Students and penny-unwise companies force developers to use freeware. Poor student tries to build a house with a crooked tack -hammer. Professional tries to build a skyscraper with equally inefficient tools. Such is life.
The wise professor or corporate manager gives the user good tools to get good results at lower cost, long term.
That's why companies like IAR and Keil have been in business so long, and continue so, despite GCC and the freeware IDEs like Eclipse and all the emIDE and alikes.
It's sadly amusing to read mid-career people ridicule spending $6K on a compiler vs. their salary costs slogging away with crummy tools and dumb dubuggers (e.g., lack of flash breakpoints). Yes, that cost is out of reach for a student/hobbyist. Maybe that was a principle of mbed's on-line - free access to a high quality compiler - but there were browser-influenced compromises. Maybe a real client side editor pushing source code/changes to an on-line compiler donated for non-profit use makes sense. How to police non-profit is the challenge.
Maybe Rowley is the closest there is in the mix of high end IDE for GCC. Eclipse is good but isn't a product so there's no decent user documentation and, IMO, Elcipse is too academic, needs a diet.
The move by Atmel to plug-in to Microsoft Visual Studio (both AVR and ARM) may be brilliant. I wish NXP had done so.
steve childress.
1 reply
Hi all!
I've been using mbed for a while now and I REALLY want to use a quality well supported (by mbed community) offline IDE and tool chain.
I'm currently using Eclipse and it has quite a few quirks with getting new projects up and running.
Are any of the paid IDE and tool chains easier to use and better supported for use with mbed? I'm willing to fork over some money for an easier to use IDE and tool chain.
Thanks in advance for suggestions and opinions!