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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?"
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 GNU stuff does fall down a bit on the documentation side, mostly because it's either out of date or just so huge it's hard to get a good grasp on it (I have a cube neighbor that hates gcc since he's used to compilers that give a anual that's very specific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.