Quote:
Originally Posted by Stuart
this post has intrigued me, but 2 questions. what is eclipse and why should I use it?(I can guess its a IDE/compiler of some sort but to me all compilers kinda look the same. what makes this "better" is the real question Im asking)
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Well, as you guessed Eclipse is an IDE, sort off. It was conceived by some people at IBM as an extensible platform, written in Java, upon which other applications could be written. When initially released, it contained a set of Java Development Tools, as an example of this type of application. Later a set of C/C++ Development Tools was released. As you know, the robotics code is written in C.
The reasons, you can't just use Eclipse CDT right away are as follows:
- Tricked you, you can, but...
- You need to know how to write a makefile.
- You won't get the syntax highlighting appropriate to MCC18 (the version of C used by the robot).
- You won't get your errors from the compiler parsed.
- Eclipse CDT can't parse the binary files (e.g., FRC_Library.lib) created by the C18 toolchain and show you the functions available inside.
Problems 2 & 4 are already fixed thanks to a plug-in I initially wrote. 2 has been fixed for a while. 4 was partially working for a while, then broke, and should be working now.
The other 2 are not working yet, but are not a very big deal. By innappropriate syntax highlighting, the only thing I can think of, is that certain keywords, such as "rom" & "ram" that are specific to the C18 version of C, aren't highlighted. Most people don't use 5 anyway (I never have).
Now why should you use Eclipse:
- My favorite, auto-completion. Hit Ctrl-Space while typing a long function or variable name, and Eclipse will show you a list of possible completions.
- Integrated Subversion/CVS support (was not available in MPLAB until very recently, and is still no where as nice)
- A tabbed editor, rather than the horrible MDI interface MPLAB uses.
And it's usable, as chris31 said on Windows and Linux. However, don't be scared off by this fact. If anything, it's more usable on Windows than Linux because there is no hassle with WINE (a sort of windows emulator to get the compiler working)
If you want more info see
www.eclipse.org
Hope I answered your question,
Ben