Extension mechanisms in Montana

Montana is a new C++ programming environment being developed at IBM. Montana aims to improve the software development experience by providing rapid incremental builds, rapid complete builds, and a tightly integrated user interface driven from a single source of information. Montana uses a program representation (CodeStore) to achieve these aims, with compilation proceeding directly from the database. APIs for accessing information about programs from the CodeStore are also made available for tool builders. In this paper we focus on the extension mechanism in Montana, which enables integration of existing tools and creation of new sophisticated, tightly integrated tools.