C/C++ IDE support for HotSpot

[Mikael Gerdin]

Hi all,

I've finally grown tired of manually setting up a hand crafted Eclipse 
CDT configuration for the JVM sources and decided to share my progress 
towards improving the overall situation for JVM developers.

To achieve better IDE support without having to add project generators 
for all different kinds of past or future IDEs I've decided to try to 
leverage CMake to do project generation.
The idea is to have the JDK build system generate a CMakeLists.txt 
describing all the include paths and definitions required by an IDE to 
interpret the sources correctly.

Several modern IDEs natively support CMake but we can also rely on the 
fact that the CMake build system has the ability to generate projects 
for a number of different IDEs. For information about which generators 
CMake supports see
https://cmake.org/cmake/help/v3.5/manual/cmake-generators.7.html
for your CMake version.

To try this out check out (heh) my branch "JDK-8177329-cmake-branch" in 
the jdk10/sandbox forest:
http://hg.openjdk.java.net/jdk10/sandbox/branches
So far I've only made changes in the toplevel and hotspot repositories.
I've written a short readme in the repo:
http://hg.openjdk.java.net/jdk10/sandbox/raw-file/JDK-8177329-cmake-branch/README-cmake.html

It would be great if people tried this out to see if it works on their 
setup but I don't expect it to work on Windows without changing the 
makefile to do path conversion.
If we can make this work properly then perhaps we can get rid of the 
Visual Studio generator and rely on CMake to generate VS projects.

It would also be great if someone from build-dev could give me some 
hints about how to do the file writing and "vardeps" thing properly.

Thanks
/Mikael