Hi there,
for a possible rewrite of software running on custom hardware built around a Hitachi/Renesas H8/3002 I'm thinking about changing the development tools. Right now the "IDE" is made of IAR Compiler/Assembler/Linker and a bunch of home-brewed tools for building the program-image and uploading it to the target. The most annoying about this kind of toolchain is that it's missing any kind of debugger or simulator, which makes debugging rather hard work.
But now it seems likely that a rewrite of the software will be made, what makes me think of striking a new path and maybe get rid of the limited debugging capabilities.
I did take a quick look at the Hitachi/Renesas HEW, but as I don't have a license for it yet, I cannot do much more than catch a glimpse on the GUI and read the manual. It seems as it has everything I need (even if I crashed it just by editing, reproducible). I'm just not sure about its debugger used on anything other than an eval-board (no chance of using an eval-board).
The other possibility may be GCC which should be able to build output for th H8-Series and GDB which can hopefully be ported in a few hours to get the stub working on the H8.=20
As I'm not very familiar with both alternatives I hope someone here can help me with some pro's and con's for them or maybe point me another alternative. I'm interested in the debugging capabilities, especially those of GDB, as I've never used it before and I'm not sure what will be possible with it.
TIA, Ulf