You may have heard about Code Composer Studio v5 you are probably wondering "should I be using v5 instead of v4? And if so why didn't I receive it as an upgrade notification?"
Code Composer Studio v5 is not a replacement for v4 at this time. Instead it is available as a limited release aimed primarily at Linux Application developers. That is why you see it talked about most in association with Sitara, C6-Integra, DaVinci and OMAP devices which have an application processor often running Linux. We call these early versions CCSv5 LR, for limited release. Development of CCSv5 is still ongoing and there will be a general availability release, or GA, in 3Q11 that will be the replacement for CCSv4. The reason we are promoting CCSv5 LR is that it offers some capabilities that are not available in v4, naming support for running on a Linux host PC as well as enabling you to do Linux Application Development (non-JTAG debug).
For most users the biggest change coming in v5 are that it is based on the latest version of Eclipse (currently 3.6). As a contrast CCSv4 is based on Eclipse 3.2. There have been lots of improvements to Eclipse during that time that people will appreciate. In addition to changing the Eclipse version used we have changed the way that we work with Eclipse. In the past we would make a lot of changes to the Eclipse source code. This in turn would make it harder for us to upgrade to the latest version. With v5 and beyond we are not branching from the Eclipse source base. There is an upside as well as a downside to this. The upside is that it means that we can make the latest Eclipse versions available as part of CCS and that CCS will be compatible with all Eclipse plug-ins. The downside is that if we want to change the Eclipse source we have to submit it back to the Eclipse community and get those changes accepted into a future Eclipse release.
More information on CCSv5 as well as access to the current beta releases is available here.
