Should ST put Eclipse out to pasture?

[Zbig]

Hello,

I'm just starting with STM32. Came up with a low-power project, picked a suitable STM32L0 MCU, STLINK-V3PWR to debug and power-profile it, perfect! Then, to my horror, realized that STM32CubeIDE is based on Eclipse. I use Mac with large, high-resolution monitor and the UI on CubeIDE is unusably tiny. The splash screen displays upside-down (I kid you not). None of the suggested solutions I found to force it to scale worked. I could live with an antiquated UI from the decades past, I could try and ignore numerous Eclipse quirks and peculiarities but I cannot ignore the fact that I cannot see the UI. As a software dev myself I'm fully aware that the task of moving such a project to another platform would be nothing short of monumental. I'm not holding my hopes high, not expecting anything, just providing feedback. The truth is hardly anyone liked Eclipse back in the days it was pretty much the only game in town. Now, that every software person and their dog moved to IntelliJ or VSCode, the Eclipse development will only fall more and more behind the times. From this point on, I'll be looking at competitors' products first, just on the merit of them not using Eclipse. And while my decisions are objectively irrelevant to ST's bottom line, I can't imagine being alone in this camp. Tools do matter.

Best regards,
Zbig

[Oskar_H]

Hello @Zbig,

you are right about Eclipse being more and more dated and STM32CubeIDE is based on it since the beginning of its story. I think it would be endless harsh effort for ST to move to another platform now...

You may not be aware of ST has been surfing on the VSCode wave since last year, they have introduced their first official extension: https://community.st.com/t5/other-tools-mcus/vscode-for-stm32-extension-1-0-0-released/td-p/143795

And a couple of independant developers have also put their own extension on the VSCode market place: https://github.com/bmd-studio/stm32-for-vscode

No doubt that VSCode will become more and more important in a near future. It is a totally different approach of the IDE, it has a learning curve but at the end it is worth taking the effort.

About the splash screen which is displayed upside-down, I have answered about the causes in another post: https://community.st.com/t5/stm32cubeide-mcus/bug-report-stm32-cubeide-1-14-1/m-p/629421/highlight/true#M23487

 

[Zbig]

Thank you @Oskar_H for the hint about VSCode extension, I will definitely check it out.

Your explanation for the upside-down splash screen is also interesting. My first incorrect wild guess was some integer math overflow (e.g. when picking the starting corner). I think I'll leave mine like that just for the LOLz ;)

[Andrei Chichak]

The upside down splash screen is a result of an update to MacOS and has been fixed in mainline Eclipse. It's up to ST to incorporate those changes in a future release.

[Semer CHERNI]

Hello @Zbig 

First let me thank you for posting.

As @Oskar_H ST is providing extension for VSCode which could be a replacement to STM32CubeIDE at this point.

I also want to mention that your feedback is not irrelevant as your feedback help to improve the ST ecosystem.

KR,
Semer.

[Andrei Chichak]

I'll throw in my 0.02CDN.

I was using something called Visual Studio from Microsoft. It was fine. Then I heard about this Eclipse thing that came out of IBM, tried it once and immediately deleted Visual Studio, and VS was my every day professional firmware developer editor. Eclipse was so much better than anything that was available, plus it brought back features like auto completion that I hadn't seen since 1985. Hitching the development cart to Microsoft set the computing industry back about 2 decades. Bygones...

Later, happily people like ST, NXP, and TI all based their IDE on Eclipse. Hooray, no more having one IDE per processor family.

Microchip made the choice of going with Java Beans rather than Eclipse. A terrible, terrible choice, but it was better than no IDE at all, right? So I guess, like every other place where you give people the opportunity to have an opinion, every single choice is wrong, especially when the new shiny comes around.

There are tons of people in embedded systems that will immediately want command line everything because no IDE is as good as their long hard struggle to get their minds around the random runes of gdb, gcc, and vi. Some will see that the IDE is a way to get stuff done. Some will want the latest thing. Others will be cautious of getting too close to Microsoft, lest Microsoft makes a decision that kicks their foundation out (ThreadX) (wait, Microsoft gave ThreadX (Azure RTOS) to ... Eclipse).

ST/NXP/TI/Microchip/Nordic will all be looking at all of this information when deciding to change something that they give away but helps sell their main product.

[RDrum.1]

Microchip made the choice of going with Java Beans rather than Eclipse.

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OMG what a flaming heap of muck that is. It kills me every time I'm forced to use it.