Re: STM32 ARM toolset advice?

Bocote wrote:
Yes I might be able to find a contractor who would be willing to tell me
they can easily fix a thorny compiler bug - but having been burnt by over
confident coders, I would not risk my business or the jobs of people who
are employed by it on the basis of a contract who thought they knew how
compilers work better than a compiler vendor.

The only difference to the proprietary closed-source compiler here is
that the closed-source company won't tell you "unfortunately, our guru
retired, and we don't know how it works" even if that's the truth. Or
they tell you they're restructuring and are no longer interested in
supporting this product.

I recently worked with another company who used a "free compiler" with all
the library sources provided for the embedded chip they put on one of the
boards in the system – wow they had problems, lots and lots of problems.
They ended up re-writing library functions, after of course working out how
they were supposed to work and how they actually worked, and several
abortive attempts to fix them themselves. etc. their "free tool" added
months to the project, now that I don't call free.

I still don't see how that task had been easier for you if you didn't
have source. The whole point is about having source, not about free. And
I don't think the open-source libraries have worse quality than the
proprietary ones. I have also fixed numerous bugs in the commercial
libraries we bought. Including some the vendors refused to fix. Even
trivial ones such as using 'char' instead of 'unsigned char' for
marshalling, which happens to work on PCs, but not on our target.

That aside, guess what you see when you look into a commercial system? I
found a NetBSD VFS, NetBSD IP stack, expat, gzip, Spencer's regexp.c,
etc. in that we bought. So it cannot be that bad.

I guess my objection to open source is the way it is always portrayed as
"free" and "better than software you pay for". The trouble is the real
costs are ignored.

The points where I think OSS is "better" are:
- you can evaluate it easier. No need to sign advance NDAs or hand out
money. You do not even need to wait for the mail package to arrive
next week, and you can usually get honest opinions on it on mailing
lists.
- you can look into it. Some commercial software also allows that, but
by far not all. I haven't seen a commercial compiler that ships the
source for its 'printf' yet.
- you can still modify it, even if its original author no longer wants
to. Yes, this may be expensive, but at least it's possible.

I haven't found anything where closed-source software is fundamentally
better. Warranties? Nobody guarantees you anymore than his software
takes up disk space, and maybe gives you free replacement if the shipped
CDs get unreadable within six weeks. Support? Commercial support can be
had for OSS, too. Otherwise, support is simply structured differently
than for classic closed-source SW. The big company you can sue if
something goes wrong? Did anyone *ever* sue MS or IBM when their
software failed?


Stefan

.

Relevant Pages

  • Open Dylan 2011.1 released
    ... It is a pleasure for us to finally announce a release of Open Dylan. ... their code for the compiler and runtime libraries under the MIT ... The C back-end currently does not support multi-threaded programs. ...
    (comp.lang.dylan)
  • Re: linux/unix script to dump csv files for each table in db
    ... I know I ought to know how to fix that off the top of my head, ... PerlEx support in CGI::Carp ... 28671 Define PERL_NO_DEV_RANDOM on Windows ... 27736 Make perl_finirun with Sun WorkShop compiler ...
    (comp.databases.oracle.server)
  • Re: STM32 ARM toolset advice?
    ... they can easily fix a thorny compiler bug - but having been burnt by over ... compilers work better than a compiler vendor. ... abortive attempts to fix them themselves. ... I don't think the open-source libraries have worse quality than the ...
    (comp.arch.embedded)
  • Problem with php5-dba build && install
    ... checking for C compiler default output file name... ... checking for QDBM support... ... checking whether the cc linker supports shared libraries... ... checking dynamic linker characteristics... ...
    (freebsd-questions)
  • Re: Who uses clapack?
    ... > with it and has a compatible compiler send me a line. ... wrapper for the BLAS/LAPACK or Intel MKL libraries. ... claim only to support a subset of the BLAS/LAPACK functionality (though ... I also support all of the ...
    (sci.math.num-analysis)