[chbot] Cruising aliexpress again!!

Volker Kuhlmann list0570 at paradise.net.nz
Fri Sep 25 04:17:14 BST 2015


On Fri 25 Sep 2015 11:41:23 NZST +1200, Stephen Irons wrote:

> They don't seem to have build any timebomb into gcc. I did not use their
> (Eclipse-based) tool -- that is most likely where they put the evaluation
> timebomb.

The companys' added value is not in the gcc toolchain, which is GPL and
can not really be used to generate profit. The same holds for eclipse,
although its license I think allows closed-source derivatives.

What you get for your money is some extensions for eclipse which are
tailored specifically to the target architecture, e.g. memory and
register inspections that are fully decoded to the labels and names used
by their manufacturer, i.e. you get the same names as shown in the
datasheet instead of having to hunt for bit wtf-what-was-it-again at
some flipping address. Big time saving when dealing with peripherals.
You also get proper hardware debugging, integrated with above decoding.
Add a high-speed target interface for both programming and debugging,
and perhaps a few more tricks. All this within an IDE allowing good code
navigation and compiler integration (gcc errors highlighted in source
code).

The approach with makefiles and a plain text editor lacks all the above
tools - which are not just optical sugar!

I have used the AVR plugin with eclipse 2.7 for programming arduinos,
with arduino environment. It took a while to set it all up but I did get
it going. It's a PITA because the plugin is way too buggy, and not
properly if at all maintained. Still no debugging. I then went to
makefiles too, and it's not mutually exclusive with eclipse.

People don't like eclipse. No wonder, usable target arch adaptations are
only available for big money.

The free version eclipse tool from NXP for their mbed stuff had no time
bomb but a restriction in code size. It was implemented in the
programmer/debugger driver .so files.

Volker

-- 
Volker Kuhlmann
http://volker.top.geek.nz/	Please do not CC list postings to me.



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