Eclipse[10]

1
Eclipse10

• MIPSinEclipse

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Overview

• Goal To provide a friendly development
  environment for CS students programming in MIPS
  (particularly CS33 at UCLA), and early exposure
  to Eclipse

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Updates since last presentation

• Completion of all milestones/requirements, many
  new features implemented since the midterm, plus
  an extra feature that was not in our requirements
  (SPIM execution with breakpoints)

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Features

• Editing environment with
• Syntax highlighting
• Code collapsing (folding)
• MIPS label browser for quick location of labels
• MIPS Help pop-ups explaining instructions and
  formats, viewing window with instruction set

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Features

• Macro processor capabilities
• Simple (string) macros
• Macros with arguments (like functions)
• Combining different files into a single file to
  run in SPIM
• Note on the macro processor using an existing
  macro processor was taken into consideration
  none were found that were open source, easy to
  integrate (written in java), used a simple
  grammar, and known to be reliable (we found one
  on sourceforge, but it had no error checking in
  it)

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Features

• Simulator (built over SPIM)
• Normal execution
• Single step execution
• Execution with breakpoints
• Viewing window for register contents in different
  formats (hex, decimal, etc.)

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Potential

• Almost all universities teach MIPS architecture
• SPIM is the most popular simulator, but doesnt
  have an editor, and does not take macros or
  provide for execution with breakpoints
• The Eclipse environment provides many nice
  features (indexable help contents, version
  management, searches, etc.)
• Open source free and customizable

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Working with eclipse

• For an application like this, it saves you a lot
  of work!
• You have less to do because the Eclipse
  environment already has a lot of what you need
  (menu bar, customizable layout, search
  function, etc.)
• Many components that you want probably already
  exist in the API (such as file wizards, message
  dialogs, and more)
• Its easy to test your plug-in just click run
  to start new instance of Eclipse with plug-in
  added

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Working with Eclipse

• The challenge seemingly simple tasks can take a
  lot longer than you expect
• It is sometimes less than obvious how something
  should be done in Eclipse, since many of the
  internals are somewhat hidden from the developer
• Finding helpful documentation on Eclipse plug-in
  development is difficult
• Eclipse comes out with new versions frequently, a
  lot of documentation is outdated, and sample
  source code no longer works (it does make a
  difference!)
• Information is scattered among many different
  sources often like grab bags of tricks
• Overall, we think its a really good tool once
  you learn how to use it it allows you to do a
  lot in much less time than building from scratch

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Whats ahead

• April 10 meeting with Professor Smallberg and
  Professor Rohr to review, critique, and discuss
  possible changes and additions
• In the meantime, make improvements to quality
• More testing
• Refactoring
• More help documentation for users
• Improve the UI, aiming to make it more intuitive
  and easier to use
• Get feedback from others
• Goals release next quarter, get accepted for use
  in CS33