[sdiy] MPLAB-X alternative

[Mike Bryant]

-----Original Message-----
From: Synth-diy [mailto:synth-diy-bounces at synth-diy.org] On Behalf Of Roman Sowa
Sent: 08 March 2022 14:55
To: grant musictechnologiesgroup.com; Synth-diy
Subject: Re: [sdiy] MPLAB-X alternative

> Oh, that feels so good ;)
> Is it just me or every new microcontroller firmware development tool looks like they were made by people who never talk to microcontroller programmers?



It's not just you !   The Raspberry Pi group decided to design their own microcontroller the RP2040.   Actually a quite innovative hardware design for an ARM M0+ cored processor.  And luckily for them they bought enough wafer slots at TSMC just before the current shortages so they actually have large quantities of them in stock.

But then rather than use any of the ARM provided and supported stuff like ARM compiler/Clang, CMSIS libraries, Mbed, etc, or even alternatives like PlatformIO which is proving its worth over time, they started from scratch and produced an appalling hot-potch of an SDK that is on the verge of unusable so you have to poke the registers directly to have any trust in the code working.   They then used Cmake to sort through all the libraries at compile time using the hopeless gcc compiler so you are left with about 75% of code that is unused, so even a blink program takes 11kbytes. 

Their argument is they wanted to make it easy to learn due to their educational roots, totally ignoring the fact that anybody learning to do it their way would be totally unemployable in the commercial world and wouldn't get past the first interview.

Not Invented Here was invented in Cambridge !!