This is the New & Noteworthy page for CDT 12.0 which is part of Eclipse 2025-03 Simultaneous Release
The minimum version of GLIBC required is now 2.31. This version can be found in Ubuntu 20.04 and later, RHEL 9.0 and later and other distros as well. CDT's native components will likely work with older versions of glibc too, assuming they provide the required APIs for Eclipse CDT.
The CMake build setting GUI has been updated to include more CMake settings, and some of the settings that did not used to do the correct thing have been updated for more consistent behavior. The way these settings are saved has been slightly modified, meaning workspaces with CMake projects from before CDT 12 will have their build settings restored to defaults. Build settings can be customized by unchecking "Use default CMake settings".
TODO: Before release add the final screenshot for the build settings here. I am not including it now because the UI keeps changing.
The default for CMake's build system generator is now Ninja on all platforms. Users who want to use other build system generators can select their desired generator in the build settings.
The separate new C and C++ project wizards are now exclusively available via the New C/C++ Project wizard. From the second page of New C/C++ Project wizard select C Managed Build to access the New C Project wizard and select C++ Managed Build to access the New C++ Project wizard.
See Issue #965 for additional details, including how to restore these menu entries if your Eclipse CDT product depends on it.
New Makefile Project with Existing Code available via Existing Code as Makefile Project import wizard
The Makefile Project with Existing Code wizard is no longer available in the new project wizard. For users who need it, it remains available in the Existing Code as Makefile Project import wizard. Most users should be using the Makefile project type in the New C/C++ Project wizard.
See Issue #965 for additional details, including how to restore these menu entries if your Eclipse CDT product depends on it.
The managed build system now provides an option to specify other object files to be included when building GNU archive files:
The new option applies to static library projects using a Cross GCC, Cygwin GCC, Linux GCC or MinGW GCC toolchain.
The DSF Preference pages (Preferences -> C/C++ -> Debug -> GDB and children) are not always shown to users. Prior to CDT 12 these were not visible until after the first debug session was started.
At the first debug session CDT enables the activity for DSF (org.eclipse.cdt.debug.dsfgdbActivity), with this change nothing in CDT is bound to this activity key anymore.
The View Performance preference page, which is CDT specific, has been relocated to the Preferences -> C/C++ -> Debug section of preferences. This only affects where in the Preferences tree the page is located, the preferences and key names have not changed. In addition, this page is always visible.
For a while, the default encoding in Eclipse has been UTF-8. Starting in CDT 12, the Terminal will now default to UTF-8.
Improvements to the API for CMake has made it easier to extend and specialize CMake for ISVs. A fully worked example demonstrating the support is now provided in the CDT source in org.eclipse.cdt.cmake.example. This example demonstrates the API, and how to contribute a new project wizard to make such a project.
Please see CHANGELOG-API for details on the breaking API changes in this release as well as future planned API changes.
See Noteworthy issues and PRs for this release in the issue/PR tracker.
The CMake and CBS Makefile project launch configurations for local applications have an improved Main tab and new Arguments, Environment, Debugger, Source, and Common tabs.