Setting up the ARM-GCC toolchain and IDE…
Well, following the famous “ARM Cross Development with Eclipse Tutorial“, I setup the ARM-GCC toolchain and installed several other programs necessary to compile, flash and debug ARM code for my lpc2148 board.
I’ll start off by saying that Eclipse is a nasty piece of crap, no matter what you think. It shouldn’t take a 2.0ghz 1gig computer to edit a file and call a few programs. An IDE should be clean, simple, and fast (Eclipse lacking the latter). It’s Java, really. I don’t think that in today’s world the cross-compatibility is worth the performance it forgoes.
So, realizing half-way through the tutorial that in this embedded gnu environment Eclipse does nothing but essentially call make and take up 200megs of memory to edit main.c, I decided that I could use another tiny IDE I already happen to have installed, “Programmers Notepad“. This thing is packaged with WinAVR and I use it for my AVR projects. It’s nothing special, really, but it delivers almost everything you need in a notepad and fast IDE. WinAVR happened to configure it to have menu options to call make all, make clean, make program. Since I have the whole arm-gcc toolchain setup with the windows path, it can compile the demo ARM projects out of the box.
The next issue is debugging with gdb. This is the main reason eclipse is still installed, as it is currently my only option for using the whole ocdremote and arm-gdb setup. Although for the first part of my project debugging isn’t necessarily crucial, it might be necessary as the code becomes more complex. As for eclipse, I’m aiming to get rid of it altogether–Programmer’s Notepad is one step, but hopefully I can build an IDE entirely with vim. However, I don’t think I could build a fully functioning IDE with vim because integrating gdb might be impossible. Eclipse provides several built-in windows to watch the system registers and memory, but this doesn’t seem to feasible with vim alone. Maybe I should just use vim as my editor and compiling IDE, and then use some very light but capable gdb frontend, I dunno. As long as it’s not eclipse.
