Assessing the Next Generation of IDEs

The new boards are mostly based on 32-bit Cortex-M MCUs. The larger memory, faster clock and increased computational power allow more ambitious projects.  

As a consequence, ​the development of larger projects has a direct impact on the expectations towards the IDE. The developer wants an advanced editor, debugging capabilities and version management, among other features.

The Requirements List

​I've defined height requirements:

• OS-agnostic: The IDE should run on Linux, macOS and Windows.
• Category: A self-contained IDE is a must, so is an offline IDE. Co-existence with today's Arduino IDE is welcomed.
• Open-source: Whether the IDE or extension is open-source or proprietary.
• Underlying build manager: Let's try and stick to standards, like the GNU make.
• GUI: Is a tool-bar with buttons for the most common tasks available? Otherwise, is the GUI customisable?
• Advanced editor: Modern niceties include auto-completion, contextual help, syntax checking, ...
• Debug​: Maybe the most critical feature, with hardware debugging.
• Version management: Based on GitHub or BitBucket.

Today's Arduino IDE fulfils the 4 of the requirements, or 40% only.

The Test Protocol

The protocol includes building and linking, uploading and running, plus debugging with two breakpoints (one standard and another conditional) and one watchpoint. 

Target boards include the LaunchPad TM4C123, the LaunchPad MSP432 and the Arduino M0 Pro. All those three boards feature a hardware debugger. 

When possible, I'm performing two series of tests:

• one with dedicated extensions, when available,
• another with the makefiles I've developed with embedXcode.
  

Target operating systems include Linux Mint 18.1, macOS 10.12.4 and Windows 10 Pro. 

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A New Generation of IDEs

​Luckily, a new generation of IDEs brings innovative ideas. Some are IDEs, other are plug-ins. Sometimes, the same IDE offers different plug-ins.
​

I've assessed so far the IDEs

• Atom
• Visual Studio Code
• Qt Editor​

and the extensions

• PlatformIO extension for Atom and Visual Studio Code​
• Arduino extension for Visual Studio Code

Published 11 May 2017
Updated 16 June 2017, 19 June 2019