I come from the world of web development, where we are spoiled by probably the best DX experience in the world in many cases, if using modern toolchains. Unfortunately C/C++ and embedded development lags far behind.
STM32CubeMX can improve this situation slightly for the STM32 ecosystem.
In STM32CubeMX, under Project Manager -> Toolchain /IDE it is only possible to select one toolchain. This is a not-so-modern way of working.
If there is a team working on a software project, one should never force users to stick to one IDE, they should be able to use any IDE of their preference. As such, STM32CubeMX should have a multi-choice menu to generate the proper files for all IDEs that people want to use in a project. As IDE files are committed, it means other users can easily clone a repo and get started in their IDE immediately.
This is possible today as well, by re-generating the project for each IDE variant and committing the files, but it is cumbersome for a few reasons:
- STM32CubeMX renames some files to add the .bak extensions for example if going from STM32CubeIDE -> CMake, the .cproject file gets renamed to .cproject.bak.
- The entire flow of having to redo this for each version of the IDEs is cumbersome. Especially if doing updates that might affect the output in these files, then one would have to do it for each IDE.
The solution is simple: Let users have a multi-select menu and generate all the IDE files.
