The Embedded Systems Conference is being held in Boston, and there are a lot of things being announced there. An EE Times story on the conference describes several of those announcements, starting with broad industry support for the Eclipse tool platform. This support even includes grudging acceptance by long-term holdout Green Hills, which has taken small steps toward integrating their compilers into the framework.

This is significant, given the dominant position Green Hills has had in the embedded software tool space. Wind River threw in the towel earlier, so now pretty much the only competitor that has not supported the platform is Microsoft. This is hardly surprising, since they have their own plans for integration. Visual Studio 2005 further integrates software development for embedded devices into the dominant PC tools platform, making it relatively easy for legions of PC programmers to do at least some level of embedded application development. Microsoft’s managed code approach has generally been rejected by hard-core embedded developers, but VS 2005 finally brings native-code development in C/C++ to the toolkit as well.

In the end, it looks like it will be traditionally embedded developers finally unified behind Eclipse-based tools against the army of desktop developers who want to write applications for CE-based embedded devices. If this army takes enough interest to create some compelling applications, this will certainly drive demand for MS operating systems for embedded devices, just as it did for the desktop. If not, at least the embedded world is finally getting itself defragmented at some level.

Larry Mittag