Eclipse - Kill it until its dead!

RE: Eclipse - Kill it until its dead!

nrp — Fri, 11 Jul 2014 18:19:49 GMT

I've had pretty good experiences with CooCox and prefer it to IAR and Keil. It is Eclipse based, but makes embedded work pretty seamless on parts that are supported by it. The only big downside is that it only covers Windows.

RE: Eclipse - Kill it until its dead!

Erik Sanchez — Fri, 21 Feb 2014 18:29:47 GMT

You make it sound pretty good! My primary development environment is a Mac so it would be nice to not have to run a Parallels session full time while writing software for the Nordic. Not to mention that the Keil interface is just antiquated. It does work out of the box however and that's why I'm using it. I just don't have the time to spare to get Eclipse working.

I also spent a few hours evaluating CrossWorks because it is cross-platform. I was able to get it to work but didn't feel like swimming upstream every time I wanted to try a different example from Nordic. I just got DFU working on my app and I feel like it would have taken twice as long if I were trying to make it work with CrossWorks.

RE: Eclipse - Kill it until its dead!

FormerMember — Fri, 21 Feb 2014 17:24:54 GMT

I guess everyone has their own preference. At one point of time I also was pulling my hair out to get Eclipse to work as intended. Now I prefer Eclipse over Notepad++/Sublime alternatives because of the following reasons in the descending order of usefulness:

Being able to debug. Step by step debugging is possible with break points. Get to know exactly what's happening. Life saver.
Hovering over a function/variable/declaration to see its code/value etc. Also one can go to the declaration by pressing F3. Very useful. Otherwise one will have to use grep in command line which is cumbersome.
Availability of plugins. Two useful ones are Egit for version control and Eclox for documentation.

Yes, it can be quite painful for setting up eclipse to work smoothly, just get out of the way and let you code. But once over this threshold it can be quite pleasant. One way that Nordic Semi can make this process easier is to archive eclipse projects, so that the settings of the project can be saved and importing them can be easier. Updating the nAN29 application note and making a video will be nice. Another more difficult way is to release their own IDE based on eclipse and GCC such as LPCExpresso for NXP based MCUs. Sharing archived projects among the people in the community is also a pain because of the SDK license. This prevents sharing of even MCU startup and abstraction files, which is a pity.

RE: Eclipse - Kill it until its dead!

KPE — Thu, 23 Jan 2014 00:21:50 GMT

And suddenly I felt completely alone...

I have pretty good success with Eclipse - far greater than with Keil, which is actually the only alternative that I've used - so I might be biased :-)

I agree that Eclipse is a pain to figure and get up and running, but when you are there it begins to shine, though it's not near the quality of Visual Studio or similar dedicated and modern IDE's.

Keil is easy to get up and running if you just care for C99. If you want to go anywhere else, it is much harder than Eclipse, and you will need to have an open line to their support. Adding a file to Keil is actually even more unintuitive than with Eclipse, and Keil is definately not for people that prefers C++. Their C++ implementation is painful, and no matter how widespread and cross compatible the sources are, it will always find something to complain about. I've also tried to use Keil with GCC but the support is pretty incomplete when it comes to flashing and debugging. Besides you also have to pay (a lot) for it...

There are also many things I really dislike about Eclipse CDT as well, namely the fact that it can start multiple Debug sessions and that these are not tied to the project. The project configuration is also a little special, and it's not the most intuitive when it comes to setup. But I got everything working, including code inspection and indexing(Intellisense), special linker maps with an NVM area, GC of unused code and a lot of other useful small things that makes my job a lot easier.

I also use C++ to make my code readable, reusable and easier to maintain, and I'd really love if Nordic would do the same. It would make their examples a lot cleaner and easier to understand, and at the same time a lot more maintainable. The C++ RTL is taking up 10-20K in my case, which I think most projects can afford. I've wrapped most features of the SD, and I'm able to add custom modules and services to the stack in the matter of minutes. I only need to override a few methods of the base module to work with the stack events, timer events, characteristics read/writes/notifications and so on. By encapsulating all the basic functionality in abstract classes, all my application code is a lot easier to maintain, as it's separated into subclasses of the basic functionality.

But using C++ currently has a downside in that Nordic are not using dynamic heap allocations, and as the RAM resources are getting more and more sparse with each release, it makes a lot more pressure on my code (well, it probably goes for C projects as well). Nordic libraries and examples has almost everything pre-allocated, which you could argue is the "fast, stable and predictable" way - but you can have your C++ code pre-allocate everything you need on the dynamic heap as well. Anyway, most things don't go out of scope in these small applications, but when you are working with sparse resources, it's nice when you can reuse them. Like if we could limit the p_storage library RAM usage, as it just need its write buffers when the application is disconnecting.

I'm not a C++ guru or even close, but I've worked with object oriented design for the past 20 years, and for me getting back to straight procedural C is probably similar to having the Nordic guys go back and code their SD and examples in assembly language. It's not pretty, it's not clean - but it's expensive and difficult to work with ;-)

Unfortunately I don't have time at the moment to release my work and Eclipse findings in public quality, as the only separation between my Nordic library abstraction code and my secret application code is that it uses different namespaces and are located in their own directories within the same project. But I'd like to release it some time.

For other IDE's I would probably go for a VS plugin, as this is my native IDE: http://visualgdb.com/ - don't know it, but I might take a look one of these days.

RE: Eclipse - Kill it until its dead!

Jim — Wed, 22 Jan 2014 16:40:07 GMT

There's a rumor the JetBrains people will add C/C++ support this year. I use IntelliJ for Scala development, and it's definitely better than Eclipse (to your point about getting what you pay for).

Sublime Text is an excellent Notepad++ and lots of people are making plugins for it. Here's one I don't have the time to try out: github.com/.../SublimeGDB

I'm starting to wire my brain for Eclipse's idiosyncrasies, so I fear I may end up settling. If I could just get it to find my include files reliably for the code inspector, I might not hate it so much.

RE: Eclipse - Kill it until its dead!

Oleh — Wed, 22 Jan 2014 14:55:42 GMT

isnt CooCox an Eclipse-based IDE?

I use notepad and plain make, but would like to use a more effective IDE. For debug using Eclipse-with-GCC, sometimes it hangs... but for that price its acceptable. imho.

some time back I have tried IAR with 8081... the IDE feels kind-of archaic, eclipse is way better. (just my opinion).

some time in the future i'm looking forward to check the keil out :-) heard lots of nice feedbacks.

just my few cents.

RE: Eclipse - Kill it until its dead!

Dave — Wed, 22 Jan 2014 13:40:21 GMT

" It left me feeling like I was alone in my dissenting opinion. " - I asked around fellow freelancers and it was 50/50. Some said its not that bad while others said they hated it with a passion.

RE: Eclipse - Kill it until its dead!

Dave — Wed, 22 Jan 2014 13:35:52 GMT

Richard, ddd - OK, fair point ;)

Jim, I tried CodeBlocks too but came to the same conclusion.

If Notepad++ had GDB support that would be perfect for me but as it doesnt I tried Affinic ( http://www.affinic.com/ ) as debugger. It had a few bugs so I gave up but I think it will be a nice tool when more mature, and they build it for Mac.

John, Didnt know about CooCox but Ill certainly give it a go when I find some time :)

One thing is for sure, you get what you pay for, or in my case what the client is wiling to pay for ;) Whats frustrating is that I own a Lauterbach licensed for ARM7/ARM9 cores but cant justify adding a Cortex license at the moment.

RE: Eclipse - Kill it until its dead!

John Leonard — Wed, 22 Jan 2014 10:17:31 GMT

Hi, good feedback for us. The Eclipse/GCC option is there for those who cannot or prefer not to invest in a commercial grade product really. I'd be interested to know if anyone has experience of CooCox, is this something people think we should look at?

www.coocox.org/index.html

-John

RE: Eclipse - Kill it until its dead!

Jim — Wed, 22 Jan 2014 01:55:18 GMT

I appreciate the sentiment, but if you use a Mac Eclipse seems like the only IDE that's even close to workable.

Xcode used to be an option until Apple removed gdb support from it. Not sure if it can be wedged back in but I don't have the time to find out.

Other options like CodeBlocks aren't there yet. There's another one called emIDE that says they'll be on the Mac soon, but it's based on CodeBlocks, so who knows?

Much of the pain of Eclipse could be buttoned up by Nordic with some investment. The out of date nAN-29 isn't much of a support option. Would love to know that someone at Nordic has a Mac and is trying to make this work.

I'm not crazy for using a Mac for development. A lot of people do, and Keil is the only tool I have to launch Parallels for. Everything else i do works on the Mac.

RE: Eclipse - Kill it until its dead!

Richard von Lehe — Tue, 21 Jan 2014 23:06:23 GMT

At least it's better than ddd. Anyone remember that?

RE: Eclipse - Kill it until its dead!

Erik Sanchez — Tue, 21 Jan 2014 19:27:51 GMT

Kind of agree with you. I tried to use it for a short while because I'd rather use an open source toolchain with GCC. I also used it several years ago for C++ development and UML modeling and it was OK. I also hate to pay thousands of dollars for an IDE with a circa 1990s interface like Keil.

I couldn't believe how unintuitive Eclipse has become. I think I took a couple of years off my life just trying to add a new file to my project. I actually Googled around to see if people were talking about some kind of community snafu that's caused its demise but didn't see anything. It left me feeling like I was alone in my dissenting opinion. Glad to see someone else is out there with a similar opinion.