C/C++ IDE support for HotSpot

[Severin Gehwolf]

Hi,

On Wed, 2017-03-22 at 15:21 +0100, Mikael Gerdin wrote:
> 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.

I, for one, wholeheartedly support this effort. Hopefully this will get
in. Kudos! Note: I didn't have time to test this yet.

Thanks,
Severin