What is the best IDE for STM32?

[asrock70]

Posted on October 22, 2014 at 09:51

used for many years

Keil

products

,

but

lately

I find

that it contains

more errors

,

backlogs

and

problems than

is healthy.

Is there

TrueStudio

or

IAR

Embedded

Workbench

for

ARM

better

?

[chen]

Posted on October 22, 2014 at 11:32

Hi

You are going to cause a flame war here !

''

used for many years

Keil

products

,

but

lately

I find

that it contains

more errors

,

backlogs

and

problems than

is healthy.

''

I have not used it now for many years but that is the impression I get from some of the other poster here.

''

Is there

TrueStudio

or

IAR

Embedded

Workbench

for

ARM

better

?

''

I am forced to use Atollic TrueStudio here at work and I hate it with a passion!

Probably, the worst problem (for embedded developers) is the problem of confidence in the debugger :

sometimes in Atollic you press single step and the debugger does not come back to the next line for a LONG (we are talking minutes here) time. The rep reckons it is the ST-Link debugger. I suspect it is the Eclipse underneath doing some kind of a project inspection under the hood.

Not to mention that fact that even though I have configured Atollic/Eclipse to insert spaces instead of Tabs - it still inserts Tabs

Do not even get me started about the whole 'Tabbed window' thing.

Do NOT recommend Atollic - avoid if you can.

I used IAR at my last company. The Editor is not that great, lots it could do better.

The Debugger - does what it says on the tin. Very reliable debugger (used Segger JTag at work, seems OK with the ST-Link but only played with ST-Link and IAR at home).

I do like IAR.

(That is my personal and professional opinion)

[asrock70]

Posted on October 22, 2014 at 14:19

Enquiry

I

thought

seriously.

Depending on your

answers

,

it seems

,

everything

is the same

misery

.

Due to

BT

stack for

CC2540

I

used a

little

IAR

for

8051

and

not particularly

impressed

.

Atollic

I did not know

,

so I was hoping

for a miracle.

Well,

thank you

for

returning

to

reality

[frankmeyer9]

Posted on October 22, 2014 at 15:09

You should perhaps be a little more specific about your needs and intentions.

There are several toolchains/IDEs which are quite useful for hobbyists, but not really ready for professional use. CoIDE, EmBlocks and Yagarto are amongst them.

As professional, you are usually not free to put the look&feel of the IDE over hard facts like code size, user support, debug support, integration of test frameworks, version management etc.

[chen]

Posted on October 22, 2014 at 15:21

''You are going to cause a flame war here !''

''

Enquiry

I

thought

seriously.

''

My comment was not meant as a personal insult - just be careful about what and how you ask.

''What is the best IDE for STM32 ?''

will illicit all kinds of personal views! Then people will start arguing about it.

''

it seems

,

everything

is the same

misery

.''

As I said, I prefer IAR because the debugging side give me confidence in what the debugger and my code is doing.

Did not notice IAR bugs or crashes when I last used it.

Atollic has all kinds of issues, which is to do with Eclipse. It has also crashed on me but not very often.

As FM has said - you have not specified what you will be using this for hobbyist or professional use.

Personally, Atollic has put me off Eclipse so much that I will avoid anything that is built on Eclipse. I had the miss-fortune to use Freescale's Codewarrier (also built on top of Eclipse) on one of their training semiars. Had the same problems as Atollic - slow, clumsy and does not give you confidence in the debugging.

One more thing that Eclipse handles really badly is the 'Porject' concept, it just does not know the difference between directories and a project. It mixes the 2 up so badly that I cannot work on the same project in multiple directories, something that IAR and VisualStudio does so easily.

Therefore I would not even look at CoIDE (aka CooCox ) because it too is a Eclipse customisation.

I have not tried emBlocks yet.

[Tesla DeLorean]

Posted on October 22, 2014 at 16:10

It might be a serious question, but it's entirely subjective, as ''best'' means different things to different people. Thus you'll get a flame war.

I also really dislike Eclipse based tools, the evaluation of Atollic was painful, and honestly I can use Eclipse and GNU/GCC without paying someone.

Choices are usually driven be personal preference, and corporate edict.

[Tesla DeLorean]

Posted on October 22, 2014 at 16:15

One more thing that Eclipse handles really badly is the 'Porject' concept, it just does not know the difference between directories and a project. It mixes the 2 up so badly that I cannot work on the same project in multiple directories, something that IAR and VisualStudio does so easily.

Totally this - the whole project/workspace thing is a complete cluster.

[frankmeyer9]

Posted on October 22, 2014 at 19:28

Totally this - the whole project/workspace thing is a complete cluster.

 

I had been told that this concept of workspace / virtual project folders allows for easy multi-project development and debugging. But being accustomised to a filesystem-based project structure, that Eclipse idea is totally lost on me, too.

In addition, important features like project import, file import and debug setup are counter-intuitive and totally messed up.