STVD improvements

[martonmiklos]

Posted on December 21, 2016 at 09:10

Dear ST!

As a hobby STM8 user I am forced to use the STVD with Cosmic compiler because this is the only free development environment with debug capabilities.

I would have the following suggestions to make the usage of tool less painful (because it is right now...).

- Add a do not show this dialog again options for this dialog:

I am using git which strips out the \r-s from the files, and it is pretty annoying to click on this dialog every time when a file is opened. Furthermore as the notification says only some compilers are require this (Cosmic does not).

- Add option to start the debugger automatically. It is very annoying to press F5 every time when I start debugging.

- It would be great if the start and stop debugging would have a shortcut key.

- It would be great if the debugger would be stopped automatically if the debugger sense an error:

- Add ability to add watch variables while the debugged program is running. It would not be an issue if those variables would not be refreshed until the debugger is halted next time.

- Add ability to add breakpoints on the fly. If it is not possible to halt the debugger on the newly added points until the CPU is halted that should not be an issue.

- I have noticed that saving a file takes a lot of time in a larger project with a lot of C files. Long means seconds which makes me nervous every time. After poking with ProcesExplorer it revealed that a gcc.exe is run every time to generate dumb warnings to the tools pane like:

fatal error: stdint.h: No such file or directory

This does not made any sense for me so I have created a dummy executable which just simply exits after it received the file contents through the stdin. After replacing the gcc.exe with my fake one my development speed increased a lot.

If any of the problems above would require more resources than you have please consider open sourcing the tool.

I think STM8 is a great architecture, but currently it lacks a good free development environment with debugging capabilities. STVD+Cosmic was the closest hit to this goal.

Thanks in advance!

#stvd-gdb #stvd #imporvements

[Seb]

Posted on December 21, 2016 at 10:14

Thanks for the feedback, forwarded to the right person to look at it.

Because most STM8 customers are -historically- using windows based environment, the LF/RT was overseen.

An ex-STM8 application engineer :) 

[martonmiklos]

Posted on December 21, 2016 at 10:43

Dear

marsanne.sebastien

,

Thank you for your quick response.

Of course I am also using it in Windows based environment, but my version control system replaces the line ends with UNIX style ones.

BTW. could you please share me with the contacts of your colleague(s) who is/are developing the GDB for the STM8 (and formerly ST7)?

I would like to get the source code of the most recent version to port it to a more recent version of the GDB which supports MI (Machine Interface).

If it would be done another IDE-s like Eclipse CDT and QtCreator could be also used for development which would -I think- heavily improve the development experience with STM8. Imagine code completition, code navigation, and debugging support with the same IDE.

And you know better experience leads to greater profit!

[qwer.asdf]

Posted on February 22, 2017 at 13:57

I would also like to get rid from this dialog:

It is a time consuming irrational dialog...

Check out any ''normal'' vendor tool's IDE: Texas CCS, MPLAB X. Neither of them has such an unintuitive feature...