Comments on: Do you care if your development tools are Eclipse based?

By: D.S. @ LI

D.S. @ LI — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 18:48:46 +0000

I use Eclipse on a daily basis and have so for at least 6 years to do 100% embedded development. So many posts here start off with “I don’t really use Eclipse” or “I used it once years ago”. Maybe you should give it another chance? Or maybe you only spent a few hours with it. I have been a Vi, Emacs, etc. user for many many years too and am SO HAPPY not to have to deal with those editors anymore. You complain about setup and sane defaults and sharing projects with developers, all issues I have no problem with in Eclipse and have had all of those problems with Emacs setups over the years for example. Getting tags to work was always a problem. Just works in Eclipse and works in the background as I edit. Re: using the command line, of course I can use it when I want. Re: makefiles, you can still use makefiles in Eclipse without a problem. And then there is the plug-in world where I can get all kinds of useful add ons, Integrated source control saves huge amounts of time. I could go on but you get the picture. I never want to go back to the old days. I want my tools to integrate with Eclipse.

By: A.L.S. @ LI

A.L.S. @ LI — Sun, 03 Jul 2011 20:31:12 +0000

I buid my software on the command line window in a makefile based environment.

I started using eclipse when Borland killed CodeWright, some 5 or 6 years ago. Since then I have been evaluating a series of IDE’s and none has showed to be better than eclipse.

By: D.W. @ LI

D.W. @ LI — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 23:15:49 +0000

I’ve only tinkered with Eclipse, mostly because I can’t comprehend how everything is organized and where I need to go to set up stuff. It just seems to different and non-intuitive to me. The worst thing a tool can do is get in the way of productivity and that seems to be what Eclipse is good at… I’m sticking with vi and makefiles as long as I can.

By: F.W. @ LI

F.W. @ LI — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 21:49:37 +0000

“…I couldn’t believe that the normally sane open source community would come up with a tool that stored fully qualified paths in the project files.”

I’m with R. on this one. Eclipse has giant, crufty project files. Do you have an Eclipse project with settings that are working well for you? Do you want to duplicate them in another project? Good luck with that. It *is* possible, but it’s way harder that it ought to be.

I used to have CodeWright as my editor/IDE. (CodeWright is dead! Long live CodeWright! Anyway…) CodeWright had a project file that was text-based, really comprehensible, and that used filenames that were relative to any base directory you wanted. I could copy and hack that project file easily to make derivative projects, install different plugins, etc.

Eclipse? Meh.

By: E.G. @ LI

E.G. @ LI — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 16:17:03 +0000

As a software modeling tool editor we investigated the opportunity to port our environment on Eclipse. We thought we could connect to all other plug-ins very easily but we found out that was not the case because guess what: there are no defined and stable APIs within the eclipse plug-ins !
It is also important to remember that Eclipse was initiated by IBM to fight Microsoft Visual Studio. A lot of things are open source in that environment and commercial plug-ins are not always welcome.
Last but not least the only way to be a plug-in is to be written with the Eclipse Java framework. So if you already have an existing technology, every thing should be re-written in that framework.
In the end I think tool vendors should try to avoid Eclipse as much as possible.

By: L.B. @ LI

L.B. @ LI — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 05:57:51 +0000

I’ve used Eclipse for 2 years. I only use as a text editor because automotive suppliers has no support for Eclipse based tools, only for its own tools (Freescale/Code Warrior, Renesas/HEW and so on). Freescale started its first Eclipse based tool for 8 bits line. KPIT GNU has one Eclipse toochain for some families from Renesas, but Renesas doesn’t support this community. So, I use Eclipse IDE and specific tool of microcontroller supplieer. I also use it for debugging of code in off board mode as assertion messages (I use MinGW). For me Eclipse is the “new way” to write code. Eclipse and plugins solve a lot of common problems of text edition. This is important, because programmers have to be focused on programming problems not with text ediditon problems. We don’t have to spend time searching a function in a library file or paste a lot of lines of incremented variables name (it’s so easy with emacs plugin!). Yes, there is others tools tha do this, but I prefer Eclipse.

Ufortunately, the plugin feature of Eclipse is not full used by companies yet. For example, You have to have 2 Eclipse installed in your PC if you use Freescale 8 bits and Renesas H8. Well, the Eclipse idea is only one Eclipse and a lot of others plugins. Manufactures don’t understand this yet.

Eclipse has made my work easier and faster!

By: T.K. @ LI

T.K. @ LI — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 05:57:22 +0000

J., after much struggling I actually did get a Stellaris toolchain up and running with Eclipse, OpenOCD and and the BD-ICDI JTAG adapter board, using Windows XP as the dev machine OS. It took a lot of reading and playing around with things, and there are still a few quirks, but I’ve actually just about finished putting together a tutorial on the process if you are interested. Once you’ve done it once, you can replicate it on another machine in less than an hour. I definitely agree that commercial tools would have been worth the cost if I could skip the toolchain setup time, although we had a requirement to use a GCC based toolchain.

Maybe I didn’t look far enough under the hood, but the demos of the commercial versions of the GCC based toolchains for Stellaris seemed to just be packaged versions of standard eclipse with a bit nicer installer, and yet the cost was just as high as the IAR and Keil versions. I think that if companies are building their commercial product on an open source solution, they either need to do a really good job of selling the differentiating features, or else price their solution at a point where the time saved compared to DIY is worth the license price, especially considering a company may need several licenses. Solutions built on extending open-source tools aren’t so much competing with other commercial solutions as they are competing with DIY.

By: M.B. @ LI

M.B. @ LI — Sat, 25 Jun 2011 20:55:29 +0000

@J. A year ago I struggled with OpenOCD myself. The environment included Linux development systems using Eclipse + GNU Tools targeting Atmel Sam7 devices. I spent over two weeks on it only to finally determine that it just didn’t work. And by didn’t work, I mean that when I programmed the devices with the Atmel tool, I got one binary image in the device. When I programmed the devices with OpenOCD/GDB tools, I got a different image, never the same one twice in a row. We scrapped OpenOCD and purchased a Lauterbach debugger and haven’t had a problem since. Which in all honesty isn’t an Eclipse problem, it was an OpenOCD problem or the small JTAG debugger we were trying to use with OpenOCD.

That being said, I personally don’t care for Eclipse. I can use it, I just don’t like it. My biggest complaint is its response to user input speed. When I click something, I want it to respond immediately, especially if I’m editing text. If it intermittently pauses for short times when opening files, redrawing text to the screen, etc., it disrupts my concentration and becomes a hindrance not a help.

By: J.R.H. @ LI

J.R.H. @ LI — Sat, 25 Jun 2011 02:21:21 +0000

We lost a FORTUNE trying to hobble together the Eclipse environment for embedded development and debugging for a Stellaris target. The GNU tools worked fine for cross-compiling. The big disaster was in trying to piece together the debug toolchain. We first tried to use a simple JTAG dongle with OpenOCD. We could never find a combination of versions of gdb, OpenOCD, and the FTDI drivers that would work together. OpenOCD and to some extent even the GDB command set changed RADICALLY over simple minor revisions. I managed to tweak it into shape once, and then someone rev’d something and I could never get it to work again.

We also tried with a premium J-Link JTAG dongle and the J-Link GDB server, and still couldn’t get it to work with the nightmare of drivers and initialization strings, even with Segger’s help. Again, after 10′s of hours of banging my head against the wall, I got it to download on one system, but we could never reproduce it on another system and could never get the debug stepping to work properly.

We installed the IAR workbench and with one Email exchange with IAR for setup details, it worked instantly.

Don’t give me the “community support” line of crap. I’m not a hobbyist. I have to get work done. For embedded development, proven, complete toolchains and direct support are the rule if your project is at all mission critical.

That being said, if you don’t have any debugging needs, open-source tools should work pretty well for cross-compiling and then all you have to deal with is the JAVA idiocy of Eclipse — buggy, slow, arcane, distracting.

By: D.G. @ LI

D.G. @ LI — Sat, 25 Jun 2011 02:20:57 +0000

I use Eclipse some and just finished a project working with MPLAB IDE v8.
Maybe MPLAB X is and improvement, but v8 was basically not usable. It was a way to run the compiler and debugger, but editing code was a complete waste of time. I also have a dual montitor setup. Putting the IDE in the second, larger monitor made it crash. Why? I have no idea.
The idea of Eclipse and plug ins is a good one. Still there are three separate installs on my machine. Each vendor’s version is incompatible. An expert may be able to get all the plug-ins working together happily. I just don’t have the time to become an Eclipse expert too.