Re: Eclipse embedded development woes, req feedback

On Thu, 28 Sep 2006 16:54:13 +1000, Mark McDougall <markm@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:


However, IMHO, Eclipse is an absolute POS. If I wasn't forced to use it
as part of the SDK then I wouldn't touch it with a 10-ft clown pole.

I got so fed up trying to control the debugger I reverted to using
printf's, except where using the debugger was absolutely necessary. I
didn't even use the editor - it was *painfully* slow on a 3.2GHz
machine!!! At the end of it all, I used Eclipse to click on 'build' and
'download' and that's about it. And then I washed my hands - thoroughly!

[dons flame-retardant underwear]


I have to agree. The concept is bad. I guess everyone (well, company
marketing departments) wants to be like microsoft and have a "do
everything" IDE. I actually use MS Visual studio 6, I don't love it
but it requires relatively little memorisation of magic keys and it
works. However, I just use it as an editor, I don't do windows
programming. (I could easily go into a rant about how bad magic ide
accelerator key stuff can be -- do I really need a 1 keystroke entry
into a font editor? but I digress).

I think the ultimate perfect editor is EMACs, but I refuse to waste
all those neurons on memorizing key sequences. What I want in an
editor is for the common stuff to be easy (like non-modal WYSIWYG
editing) and the hard stuff to be available in menus. A few things are
nice with single key accelerators (like search, search next, search
prev).

Codewarrior and codecomposer are similar in concept to Eclipse. Both
are annoying. Nothing like waiting for seconds for all the dlls to
load. And nothing like loading tons of dlls and who knows what into an
already full windows registry!

The basic IDE concept is bad. It completely breaks any concept of
scripting. It violates all the good parts of separating mechanism and
policy. If you really need one button push to start a compile, the OS
probably can do that. An IDE makes several simple tasks complicated. I
can live without a fancy debugger interface, if I can get one that
works predicably with problematic hardware.

There are about 3 things an ide does. First it is an editor, I cannot
imagine anything more personal and unchangeable, except maybe
religion. Second it is a "build" interface - which in any kind of
reasonably complex scenario is a one button start of "make" and last
is a debugger interface. I am particularly sensitive about this one,
on my list of important capabilities number one is reliable. All other
debugger features are optional and "nice". Maybe there are other
"features" in a IDE, but usually they are just automating simple OS
commands.

I have installed eclipse (on Linux) about 3 times over the last couple
years. Each time it was buggy, hard to understand and unneccessarily
complex. Each time it was different though. It is easy to understand
how companies that really wish they had a codewarrior would like to
adopt Eclipse. It is just too much complexity in the development
environment, where many other complex things need to be done.

It will be a while before I install it on Windows. You don't know how
I hate to have to install yet another IDE on my fragile, full Windows
XP registry. If I can I avoid it.

Steve
There is no "x" in my email address.
.