Programming and debugging STM8 with Eclipse and Cosmic

[Alessio Caligiuri]

Hi all,

I'm a beginner with the STM8 microcontrollers and for my first tests I'm using STVD and Cosmic C compiler.

I'm quite familiar with Eclipse and I'd like to use that IDE. Is there anyone experienced in programming and debugging STM8 with Eclipse and Cosmic C?

Surfing on the internet, I found some people that use Eclipse + SDCC, but I read that SDCC produces less optimized code respect to Cosmic. So, my idea is to use Eclipse + Cosmic C. Is it possible? Can you help me?

Many thanks!

Best regards,

Alessio

[Philipp Krause]

While I personally am not familiar with Eclipse, I can offer some data on Cosmic vs. SDCC. I did a comparison a while ago (http://www.colecovision.eu/stm8/compilers.shtml).

Back then SDCC generated code of similar size to Cosmic. For integer code, SDCC generated faster code, while for floating-point, Cosmic generated faster code.

Philipp

[Alessio Caligiuri]

Hi Philipp,

many thanks for your reply. The link you posted is very interesting.

Anyone that uses Eclipse with STM8?

Best regards,

Alessio

[Philipp Krause]

There is a German-language thread about getting that to work on Windows here:

https://www.mikrocontroller.net/topic/438246

Those who succeeded apparently used information from https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6672785/eclipse-with-sdcc-plug-in-always-has-an-error-of-java-lang-nullpointerexceptio (to get the SDCC plugin for Eclipse working on Windows) and https://stm8-binutils-gdb.sourceforge.io/. The latter is the home of the gdb stm8 port (used for on-target debugging; apparently the author also uses Eclipse - while I have used that gdb port for on-target debugging I did not use it with eclipse).

A blog entry on using SDCC with Eclipse and the GDB port on GNU/Linux: https://justanotherelectronicsblog.com/?p=432 (this one doesn't use the SDCC plugin for Eclipse though, and just uses a Makefile-based project).