Legacy codewarrior development

[vier_kuifjes]

Just a simple question : has the development of the Metrowerks based Codewarrior stopped in favour of the new Codewarrior V10 for microcontrollers?

[J2MEJediMaster]

There will be some maintenance work done on the "Classic" (Metrowerks) IDE for a while, but the short answer is "yes". The Eclipse-based CW IDE is what will be used going forward.

---Tom

[vier_kuifjes]

That's a pity... I can't find my way around in CW10...

[ZiglioNZ]

Eclipse as an IDE is an industry standards. The advantages of having a standard platform far outwheigh the disadvantages.

I think Freescale have done a good job at porting every single feature from legacy CW but obviously there are some bugs they need to fix.

Last time I tried I wasn't able to rebuild the C library and that's absolutely fundamental for us.

If you're used to CW 7.1 you'll have to spend some time to find yourself again. Some things are not as obvious as before. One thing that was much better in the old CW is the concept of targets: you can easily open two target setting windows and compare them side by side. In Eclipse it's not the same: you need to switch the compilation target but you can't open both for an easy comparison (as far as I know).

The other thing that's worse is monitoring expressions and memory at a breakpoint, it's just so good in CW 7.1 and not so good in Eclipse.

Remember Eclipse wasn't designed with embedded development in mind. It started as an IDE for high-level development and with Java it's where it really shines.

Where CW7.1 was definitely worse IMHO was the building process. The dependency tree is autogenerated and often broken. The project file is binary and would often break for us when, for example, removing the dreadful 'Rescued Items' .

With Eclipse, the way Freescale seem to have done it is to generate external makefiles at the beginning of the build and then call external command line tools.

While not the fastest (why not using the CDT's internal make!?), it's certainly more transparent.

Some features in Eclipse are extemely powerful: try 'Call Hierarchy' and 'Type Hierarchy', I love them.

There's an integrate quick outline accessible with CTRL-O.

You can also set a coding style that matches yours or your company's standard. You can have multiple styles and apply them really easily.

And then there are plugins: there's a plugin for everything. No need to get out from the IDE to compare and check in code into version control. The compare feature in Eclipse is really good.

The more you use it the more you'll love it, I'm sure. And you'll rapidly see benefits in productivity.

Emanuele

[J2MEJediMaster]

I admit the Eclipse UI takes some getting used to, especially if you have used the Classic IDE a long time. This will date me, but I was using CodeWarrior back when the tools were owned by Metrowerks, and the version numbers weren't higher than three. Even back then, we were getting requests for Eclipse compatibility.

The biggest adjustment is that what is known as the "target" in the Classic IDE has become a build configuration and a launch configuration in Eclipse. This arrangement provides more flexibility, but as ZiglioNZ

  has mentioned, it makes comparing the settings between different projects a lot more difficult.

---Tom

[vier_kuifjes]

I too used codewarrior when it was still Metrowerks, to program a HC12 in assembly language. I immediately felt at home at first use, and the switch to coldfire was quite easy.

I have tried converting my Coldfire Lite project to CW10, but when trying to compile it there are lots of errors. Lots of undefined symbols, and I cannot figure out how to solve them. I know Coldfire Lite itself is ageing, but that doesn't mean it should not be possible to convert it to CW10...