Lpc2000

> -----Original Message-----
> From: lpc2000@yahoogroups.com [mailto:lpc2000@yahoogroups.com] On Behalf
> Of Marko Panger
> Sent: Sunday, November 06, 2005 3:26 PM
> To: lpc2000@yahoogroups.com
> Subject: Re: [lpc2000] Looking to buy compiler
> 
> Hi,
> Mr. Dan and Mr. Greg said some thing which I simply must comment. Sorry.

Free speech is a wonderful thing :)

> While I agree that if you are a HW engineer and you have just to toggle
> some IO pins go with a commercial product which is very easy to use, I
> totally disagree that GCC is bad documented, no support,...and things
> like you wrote. For sure you don't know GCC world enough to comment like
> this. I don't want to go further with this bar discussion but
> inform/teach yourself a little bit about GCC/Gdb/RDI and such things and
> you will be pretty surprised how powerful GCC and companion tools are.

Err, the system we designed that had 2000 PowerPC processors in that
reconstructed particle tracks from proton/antiproton collisions was hardly
bit banging...  I never said GCC was not powerful, it very powerful with a
very steep learning curve.  I can walk away from a Keil project and come
back to it in several months and be back up to speed in minutes.  My
experiences with GCC are not so good.

> And really you don't have to build your own car, because you can get
> precompiled packages of GCC. (www.gnuarm.com, www.codesourcery.com) ,
> and try to RTFM before comment so hard.

Pre-built or not it's still hard to use.  For instance, I wanted to set the
code protection bit on a LPC2194.  Keil I do this in the C code:

const unsigned int CodeReadProtect _at_ 0x000001Fc = 0x87654321;	//
Turns on security bit in the LPC2194

This was VERY easy to find on the Keil documentation on how to specify a
variable at a fixed location.  Even if I did not find it in the
documentation all I would have had to do is to call Keil and they would have
helped me out.

I tried and tried to RTFM on how to do this with gcc, got no where.  Asked
this news group how to do this and was told to look into linker scripts.  I
FTFM'd the linker script documentation and woke up in a pool of drool and a
real bad headache.  GCC/GNU documentation is written for GCC/GNU programmers
and experts NOT hardware engineers.

I answered the original post the way I did just in case the poster was like
me.  I really really wish GCC was as easy to use as Keil, I hate spending
the yearly maintenance fee's and would dump it in a minute if I could.  I am
going to look into ImageCraft's ARM compiler when it gets a bit more mature
and try that.  It's MUCH cheaper and I have had great success with their
HC11, AVR, and MSP430 compilers.

Timothymarknorton, good luck in your compiler search!!!


Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory
Electronic Systems Engineering Group
Greg Deuerling