Re: AM623 experiences

On 2024-11-24, David Brown <david.brown@hesbynett.no> wrote:

Some vendor-supplied toolchains are not bad, but some are definitely
subpar - and often many years behind the versions you get from
manufacturer independent suppliers (like ARM's build of a gcc toolchain,
or commercial gcc toolchains).  The biggest problem with microcontroller
manufacturer's tools is usually the SDK's that are frequently horrible
in all sorts of ways.
>
But I agree with your advice - where possible, use ARM's gcc toolchain
build for ARM development.  And make sure your project build is
independent of any IDE, whether it is from the vendor or independent.
IDE's are great for coding, and vendor-supplied IDE's can give good
debugging tools, but you want the project build itself to be independent.

What he said, defintely: Avoid vendor-specific IDEs and SDKs like the
plague.

Demo apps and libraries from Silicon vendors are usually awful -- even
worse than the toolchains. I'm pretty sure they're written by interns
who think that to be "professional" it has to incorporate layers and
layers of macros and objects and abstrcation and polymorphism and
whatnot.

As a result I rememeber failing to get a vendor's "hello world" demo
to run on a Cortex-M0+ because it was too large for both the flash and
RAM available on the lower end of the family.  And it wsan't even
using "printf" just a "low level" serial port driver that should have
been a few hundred bytes of code but was actually something like
10KB..