What do you really use for embedded projects? Do you use "standard" makefile or do you rely on IDE functionalities? Nowadays every MCU manufacturers give IDE, mostly for free, usually based on Eclipse (Atmel Studio and Microchip are probably the most important exception). Anyway most of them use arm gcc as the compiler. I usually try to compile the same project for the embedded target and the development machine, so I can speed up development and debugging. I usually use the native IDE from the manufacturer of the target and Code::Blocks (with mingw) for compilation on the development machine. So I have two IDEs for a single project. I'm thinking to finally move to Makefile, however I don't know if it is a good and modern choice. Do you use better alternatives? My major reason to move from IDE compilation to Makefile is the test. I would start adding unit testing to my project. I understood a good solution is to link all the object files of the production code to a static library. In this way it will be very simple to replace production code with testing (mocking) code, simple prepending the testing oject files to static library of production code during linking. I think these type of things can be managed with Makefile instead of IDE compilation. What do you think?

I sometimes use the IDE project management to start with, or on very small projects. But for anything serious, I always use makefiles. I see it as important to separate the production build process from the development - I need to know that I can always pull up the source code for a project, do a "build", and get a bit-perfect binary image that is exactly the same as last time. This must work on different machines, preferably different OS's, and it must work over time. (My record is rebuilding a project that was a touch over 20 years old, and getting the same binary.) This means that the makefile specifies exactly which build toolchain (compiler, linker, library, etc.) are used - and that does not change during a project's lifetime, without very good reason. The IDE, and debugger, however, may change - there I will often use newer versions with more features than the original version. And sometimes I might use a lighter editor for a small change, rather than the full IDE. So IDE...

Makefile or not?

Dec 03, 2018 44 Replies

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Dave Nadler 7 years ago

Except Microchip ;-(

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David Brown 7 years ago

Yes - they have NetBeans (with plugins) for PIC, and I presume they still have Atmel's MSVS-based Visual Studio.

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Dave Nadler 7 years ago

To ensure chaos, do Microsemi (now owned by Microchip) tools use Eclipse?

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Tauno Voipio 7 years ago

Right - after buying Atmel, there's Atmel studio, which should disappear the way of dinosaurs. It forces the whole Microsoft IDE environment, and it is a PITA for us non- Windows users.

Eclipse is actually pretty flexible, if it is used with standard GNU makefiles, written by the programmer and not the IDE.

-TV

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Queequeg 7 years ago

If you aren't afraid of Python, take a look at scons. I usually use scons to do the compilation and makefile to do everything else.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lSzL1DqQn0

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