New RTist releases showcase improvements, Eclipse installs

The HCL RTist has been working hard to improve on its realtime modeling tool, leading to two new releases:

• RTist 10.3 2020.03 — a regular production quality release to be installed on Eclipse Photon.
• RTist 11.0 2020.03 — an experimental release for the next major RTist version which is based on Eclipse 2019.06.

Here are some of the improvements in the new releases:

There is a new property page for classes, capsules and interfaces. It’s called Nested Types and it allows you to control the order of other types that are defined within the parent type. In C++ code, it can be necessary to have the nested types in a certain order to avoid compilation errors, and previously reordering of nested types could only be done from the Advanced property page. Now with this new property page, it’s much easier.

The startup of the build server was improved in this release. A number of error situations are now better handled and if a problem occurs when starting the server error messages will now be easier to understand.

The model compiler now supports the C++ 11 construct rvalue references (&&). This allows you, for example, to define your own move constructor and move assignment operator. You can also use rvalue references in other places where you want a reference to an rvalue, such as in code snippets and as the type of attributes or operation parameters. The support for rvalue references was implemented by relaxing the rules of the type syntax that is supported by the model compiler. As a positive side effect of this, all native type references are now supported and will be transferred verbatimely into generated C++ code. For example, you can now use comments or compiler specific directives when referencing a type.

Note: This change is not fully backwards compatible. It’s possible that your existing models contain errors in native types that previously were not detected. Now, when the native type is used verbatimely in generated C++ code such errors will be detected by the C++ compiler. If you get such errors you should correct the native types used in your model.

Documentation that previously only was present on IBM DeveloperWorks, have now been moved into the Eclipse Help, under the chapter RTist User’s Guide. This includes wiki articles, newsletters and more. This work was done as a preparation for the shut down of the Connections part of IBM DeveloperWorks which will happen on March 31. A positive side effect of having the contents in the Eclipse Help is that it now is searchable from within RTist.

All features mentioned above are present both in RTist 10.3 and RTist 11. In addition, RTist 11 contains a few specific bug fixes and features. For example, it has a new Libraries menu which contains handy commands for importing the Connexis and TcpServer library projects into your workspace. The TargetRTS Wizard command is now also found in this menu.