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Ask Slashdot: Best OSS Embedded Development Platform
AchilleTalon writes "As many of you may know, there are two main competitors on the Windows platform for embedded software development, namely IAR and Keil. By embedded development, I mean development for microprocessors like the well known 8051 and the likes, not mobile platforms which include a complete OS in first place. I am seeking for alternatives to IAR and Keil in the OSS world. Even if I can find pieces of code here and there, I haven't found yet a fully integrated development platform. Does it exist? What do you use?"
avrstudio is pretty good for embedded avr, or gcc+avrdude.
And just regular gcc, avr-libc and avrdude is still better without any shitty environment on top. With whatever editor you prefer.
Really, what is this obsession with integrated development environments, with their crappy UI, editors that can't let me have two windows with different parts of a source file side by side, implemented in Java or worse, and with no redeeming qualities other than letting a user to mash one button to start the build? Do people really expect that much handholding while doing very complex kind of software development, dealing with hardware, interrupts, concurrency, etc. in the minimal environment, but they cant write a makefile? What kind of bugs do they write, ones that cause them to endlessly compile and recompile code, making random changes until something seems to work? Really? That's their workflow?
Screw that. Learn to use command line, and don't recompile every second. Use your head.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Yes, I do. Don't get me wrong, I code in vi regularly and in some ways prefer it. I usually hand-craft my makefiles. But the idea of an IDE is not just to give the user one button to start a build. A good IDE helps you read code. There's still lots of progress to be made in this, but here are some features that make me more productive in an IDE:
Your fallacy is in assuming that complex code requires working always at a basic level, but the opposite is true - the more complex the code, the more helpful tools improve your productivity.
Slashdot - News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters, in ISO-8859-1 Has just realised that beta makes this signature redundant
Yup, GCC works great on just about all the platforms, 8 to 64 bit. There's not really much that commercial compilers give you as an advantage anymore. They don't even give you decent support which is what people claim you're paying for. GNU stuff does fall down a bit on the documentation side, mostly because it's either out of date or just so huge it's hard to get a good grasp on it (I have a cube neighbor that hates gcc since he's used to compilers that give a anual that's very specific to the chip being used).
You also can't beat make for building stuff. I can't believe people try to use IDEs for these things, it's just so clunky. We used an IDE for a larger system at a previous company and it was just so painfully slow. With visual studio that used an external compiler, the exported makefiles were slower than the hand crafted ones, and it was just plain stupid to open the IDE just to click the make button.
To use these tools on Windows you need to get Cygwin to make it work more smoothly. It's not the greatest system in the world but it's much better than bare bones Windows command line. If you have a choice though, it's easier to just do it all on a real unix system like Linux or Mac OS.
That's kinda, like, your opinion, man.
If the dude don't know everything about everything, or knows there are somethings he don't know he can always ask, man. And people, would be all, like, hey, man, here's what I know, and he be like, thanks man. So we all happy now.
http://www.toppers.jp/ Is what I and many many Japanese electronics and automotive manufacturers use. It's said uTron/iTron is the most used OS on the planet actually, due to it's almost universial usage in Japanese electronics. I once heard the Toyota Prius has 5 Tron instances running in each break system alone.
Of course all the information and documentation, despite being very plentiful and for a completely Open Standard (Tron) base and Open Source (TOPPERS, etc.) implementations, is in Japanese. Probably not ideal for you, but I just wanted to mention it exists and is pretty nice.
I wasn't aware I was supposed to know everything about everything. Thanks for telling me.
Achille Talon
Hop!