On Thu 2007-June-21 08:49, "Sir Oregano, Duke of Chutney" wrote:
> 3) Cruising through the recent archives of this list, it seems there > are a handful of people who are using mspgcc successfully for active > development of mainstream products. From these folks, I'm interested > in hearing your take on the maturity of the toolchain... I've been using mspgcc for commercial development since February 2003. > What % of > your seat time do you spend coding for the target vs. troubleshooting > toolchain issues? I've not kept any records, but it has to be way over 95%. Toolchain issues seem to arise mostly when a new device has some special feature, or to work around some bizarre device erratum such as the 2131 return from subroutine/interrupt bug. To my mind, the important thing is precisely that I *can* fruifully put some time into solving such an issue at the toolchain level. With a few compiler modifications following advice from this forum, consuming perhaps a day in all, I was able to produce reliable (if somewhat sub-optimal) code for the badly-flawed early 2131 chips. > If you've got experience with both mspgcc and a > commercial package, how do they compare? Like most developers, I tried the IAR freebie compiler that comes with the TI FET first. It works, but I outgrew its limitations really fast. I then found mspgcc, and it has been sufficiently satisfactory that I've not had a motive to try the full IAR or any other commercial compiler. My job is developing hardware and its associated firmware, not tool evaluation, so I have to curb my natural instinct to to test exhaustively everything available, and pick the best. In practice, the first thoroughly workable toolchain I try gets the vote. > _Every_ toolchain has its > issues, and I have no expectation that mspgcc should be any exception > to this, so I think this is a reasonable question. Right. Every processor has exceptions, many of them documented. Every toolchain has bugs. As Dijkstra so memorably put it, "All significant systems still contain bugs". Of course we'd all like everything to be perfect, but we have to face the fact that the person who never made a mistake never made anything. I think the important thing evolving in open-source software is the co-operative attitude to detecting, analysing, and fixing bugs. Whenever I move from a commercial product to an open-source one, the support and speed of bugfixing improve, and the tolerance of foolishness, impatience, and bluster drops. This suits me perfectly. I know that if I do a really good job of isolating a bug, and reporting it, it will be gone in days, and that's very motivating. It also ensures that, if the "bug" is really my foolishness or misunderstanding, there's a good chance I'll isolate the cause myself, the fastest possible fix. The best thing about mspgcc is that, being based on a mature compiler technology, it works very well nearly all of the time. The second best thing is this forum, which has put me right when I've made my own mistakes, and unfailingly offered useful help whenever I've had a problem. -- Rick Jenkins <[email protected]> Hartman Technica http://www.hartmantech.com Phone +1 (403) 230-1987 221 35 Avenue. N.E., Calgary, Alberta, Canada T2E 2K5
