Lpc2000

Hi,

I just wanted to share my thoughts (broader
perspective \ufffd not limiting to LPCs alone) on this. I
am an engineer with experience starting with 8bit PICs
to superscale 64bit MIPS multi-processors & have used
a lot of IDEs to do projects from start-to-finish.

Definitely IDEs offer a lot to young engineers (like
myself a couple of years back), as it is easy to work
with & gets the work done with simple image structures
\ufffd which is what is needed in most of the projects.

For others who work with very complex image structure
involving multiple images loaded & executed at various
times & address ranges, with complex load / execution
address mapping for various sections within each image
\ufffd it is almost impossible with IDE tools alone & it is
practice to write the image map by hand (by way of
linker scripts -- ARM calls it scatter load map files)
& also the startup assembly file by hand. GNU make
with shell scripts (some useful commands) can help in
a lot of pre / post processing with the rich set of
tools provided by unix (or cgywin on windows \ufffd I am a
windows person (emacs & VI are still difficult for
me), but I have seen the wonders one can do with unix
utilities like sed, awk \ufffd very powerful indeed). With
Makefile you know exactly what happens piece-by-piece
& you have greater control.

IDEs vs command line tools (GNU make & scripts) can be
compared to point & shoot cameras vs SLRs. By the way
I still use a point & shoot camera for all my pictures
\ufffd hey it works great for me & I don\ufffdt see a reason for
owning a SLR now. That doesn\ufffdt mean someone using it
spend  the extra money & effort in vain. It is
person-to-person & is need based ( I did not
appreciate Makefiles & scripts until the need came for
it much longer after I started my f/w career). With
debuggers, I still use UI debuggers, with GDB -
Insight & even at places I was pushed to use gcc tools
without insight, I use it with emacs to make it look
close to UI debuggers.

CLI tools:
Do you need it? & Can you handle it? For those who
would eventually end up working with complex images \ufffd
should start on them & at 1st it looks very difficult
to work with but later on it is as simple as writing a
README file on notepad. 

Cheers & hope this benefits someone,
-Mike.


		
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