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I'll never understand why professional embedded developers just suck this up Here's my point of view: historically, software engineers didn't pick the ecosyste

I'll never understand why professional embedded developers just suck this up Here's my point of view: historically, software engineers didn't pick the ecosystem. The electrical engineers did. They looked at (in descending order) cost, I/O capability, manufacturing lifespan, and then finally the software ecosystem. When things started getting too similar the chipmakers picked up on this and started selling the software as feature: "Our neato IDE has a Part Wizard! You pick the part and variant and our gizmo will set up a blank project with headers and mux already done. You can run Hello World with a mouseclick!" And thus we got things like CodeWarrior in Eclipse. The dirty little secret in embedded is that everyone is lazy and they're behind. If that manufacturer-provided IDE does the setup and gets my code launched on the part then let's go. Hell, they even give me reference projects to steal from! Look at all the work the OP does setting up a compiler and makefiles. Could we have done that years ago? Of course. But nobody wanted to make the effort. A lot of us have moved on. I recently worked in an ecosystem built with Zephyr, ARM GCC (psst: get it right from ARM and skip Launchpad), VSCode (w/Cortex Debug plugin), Git, and CMake. The only thing I had to pay real money for was the JTAG debugger. It ran natively in Linux and it was sweet.

markrages 6y ago
If you're strapped for cash you can run Blackmagic Probe firmware on a $2 bluepill board for JTAG with a fully open-soure tool set. (I run it on a $2 esp8266 for wireless JTAG. Open-source gives many options!) Free as in speech, almost free as in beer. Less than a single (good) beer.
- joezydeco 6y ago
  Everyone loves a Chestnut Brown ale that your neighbor brewed in his basement. But my clients prefer name brands delivered in sealed bottles.
  - ducktective 6y ago
    Yeah, the parent comment was talking about cheap alternatives. "Sealed Bottles" cost too much for hobbyists. Also, is there a named-brand WiFi/Wireless GDB debugger?
  - markrages 6y ago
    For the sealed-bottle experience, you can buy the commercially supported Black Magic Probe hardware. Still open-source and better integrated into gdb than Segger etc.
xondono 6y ago
Can I ask which JTAG debugger specifically? I’m in the market for a good one.
- joezydeco 6y ago
  Segger. Lots of choices at different price levels.
Veserv 6y ago
The tooling is not very good because nobody pays for software tools. When the electrical engineers pick the ecosystem they are not stupid enough to just use whatever tooling comes with the ecosystem for free, they spend $50k/year per engineer(!) to buy adequate tools to make their engineers productive. In contrast, software engineers and their engineering organizations are happy to waste equally valuable engineers just to save a couple bucks; it is insanity. In what other industry is a $10k expenditure an instant deal-breaker when investing in the productivity of an employee who costs more than $100k/yr? Companies invest more in the productivity of their truck drivers and admins than they do in software engineers. We are extremely valuable employees and we should demand that our companies invest reasonable amounts into actually making us productive instead of just tossing us the scraps since they are harming their own profitability by doing so. I mean, think of all the awesome tools that would make our jobs easier and more productive if our productivity were valued even half as much as the average electrical engineer.
- avhon1 6y ago
  Having used paid software development tools, I really don't think this is the case. In particular, I'm thinking of Xilinx Vivado, a popular FPGA IDE that starts at $3000/seat and is one of the worst pieces of software I've ever had to use. FPGA developers aren't cheap; I shudder to think of the amount of money paid for time spent dealing with issues and bugs in this program.
  - Veserv 6y ago
    I am not really talking about the purchase of specific tools at this time, obviously you can buy expensive garbage and the most expensive stuff is not necessarily the best. I am talking about a systemic failure to properly invest in tooling and productivity that results in tooling being undervalued. Put another way, if I gave you $1k/yr to freely spend do you think you could improve your productivity by 1%? If I gave you $10k/yr to spend could you improve your productivity by 10%? If the scale is not high enough, if I gave 100 engineers $1M/yr to spend do you think you could improve the aggregate productivity of all of them by 10%? One more way to put it is that the fully-burdened cost of a standard software engineer is something like $200k/yr. At $3k/seat Xilinx Vivado probably cost less than 1.5% of your yearly cost to your company. If your company paid you $30k/seat, or 15% of the cost of each engineer using it, do you think you could make a system that makes you (and probably everybody else in your company using it) 30% more productive than using bare Xilinx Vivado (either a different product, making your own, configuring or working around problems in Vivado)? If so, that would clearly be an economically sound investment for your company even ignoring the much more significant second-order benefits of increased productivity. Do you think anybody even seriously considered the idea of spending $30k/seat to make you more productive since everybody I have ever talked to would consider that an absolutely ludicrous throw-you-out-of-the-room amount to spend on a software engineer even though it is in fact a mere 15% cost increase and would thus only require a similarly modest productivity increase to be economically sound. Given the way people normally talk about such a thing you would think it is increasing costs by 10x so would need to result in a 10x productivity increase to make economic sense, but that is just plainly not the case.
01100011 6y ago
"Historically", electrical engineers were the software engineers. You picked from a small collection of available parts which met your cost and design goals, and you put up with whatever horrific software tools supported the platform. This was my experience as an EE grad doing embedded SW work in the late 90s. Embedded back then didn't get anywhere near the attention that desktop processors received. Toolchains, debuggers, emulators, library support... all poor. Expectations were low and remained low. They could be, because most embedded stuff was handled by EE folks who didn't know any better and often weren't interested in the potential overhead of any 'better' ways. Embedded margins were always typically tight, so there really wasn't a bunch of money sloshing around to fund improvements. You're talking about an industry where fractional cent savings mattered.
- joezydeco 6y ago
  Very solid point, and something I should have said earlier. I'm a computer science major that went into embedded by circumstance of working in a particular field, but we were always kind of rare. (I should have gone into CE, which in my school was a hybrid of CS and EE and would have been more valuable). The influx of CS majors into embedded now is creating a new field of innovation and also a new field of problems, like people trying to cram node.js into microcontrollers. But, if you saw the actual code that EEs would write, the past was way way worse.
  - 01100011 6y ago
    Haha yeah, I was the young guy working with a lot of senior, senior engineers. The code was often atrocious. Those guys had a ton of knowledge, but software was just an afterthought to them. On the plus side, it kept things simple. Definitely a new world these days.

markrages 6y ago

If you're strapped for cash you can run Blackmagic Probe firmware on a $2 bluepill board for JTAG with a fully open-soure tool set. (I run it on a $2 esp8266 for wireless JTAG. Open-source gives many options!) Free as in speech, almost free as in beer. Less than a single (good) beer.

joezydeco 6y ago
Everyone loves a Chestnut Brown ale that your neighbor brewed in his basement. But my clients prefer name brands delivered in sealed bottles.
- ducktective 6y ago
  Yeah, the parent comment was talking about cheap alternatives. "Sealed Bottles" cost too much for hobbyists. Also, is there a named-brand WiFi/Wireless GDB debugger?
- markrages 6y ago
  For the sealed-bottle experience, you can buy the commercially supported Black Magic Probe hardware. Still open-source and better integrated into gdb than Segger etc.

xondono 6y ago

Can I ask which JTAG debugger specifically? I’m in the market for a good one.

joezydeco 6y ago
Segger. Lots of choices at different price levels.

Veserv 6y ago

The tooling is not very good because nobody pays for software tools. When the electrical engineers pick the ecosystem they are not stupid enough to just use whatever tooling comes with the ecosystem for free, they spend $50k/year per engineer(!) to buy adequate tools to make their engineers productive. In contrast, software engineers and their engineering organizations are happy to waste equally valuable engineers just to save a couple bucks; it is insanity. In what other industry is a $10k expenditure an instant deal-breaker when investing in the productivity of an employee who costs more than $100k/yr? Companies invest more in the productivity of their truck drivers and admins than they do in software engineers. We are extremely valuable employees and we should demand that our companies invest reasonable amounts into actually making us productive instead of just tossing us the scraps since they are harming their own profitability by doing so. I mean, think of all the awesome tools that would make our jobs easier and more productive if our productivity were valued even half as much as the average electrical engineer.

avhon1 6y ago
Having used paid software development tools, I really don't think this is the case. In particular, I'm thinking of Xilinx Vivado, a popular FPGA IDE that starts at $3000/seat and is one of the worst pieces of software I've ever had to use. FPGA developers aren't cheap; I shudder to think of the amount of money paid for time spent dealing with issues and bugs in this program.
- Veserv 6y ago
  I am not really talking about the purchase of specific tools at this time, obviously you can buy expensive garbage and the most expensive stuff is not necessarily the best. I am talking about a systemic failure to properly invest in tooling and productivity that results in tooling being undervalued. Put another way, if I gave you $1k/yr to freely spend do you think you could improve your productivity by 1%? If I gave you $10k/yr to spend could you improve your productivity by 10%? If the scale is not high enough, if I gave 100 engineers $1M/yr to spend do you think you could improve the aggregate productivity of all of them by 10%? One more way to put it is that the fully-burdened cost of a standard software engineer is something like $200k/yr. At $3k/seat Xilinx Vivado probably cost less than 1.5% of your yearly cost to your company. If your company paid you $30k/seat, or 15% of the cost of each engineer using it, do you think you could make a system that makes you (and probably everybody else in your company using it) 30% more productive than using bare Xilinx Vivado (either a different product, making your own, configuring or working around problems in Vivado)? If so, that would clearly be an economically sound investment for your company even ignoring the much more significant second-order benefits of increased productivity. Do you think anybody even seriously considered the idea of spending $30k/seat to make you more productive since everybody I have ever talked to would consider that an absolutely ludicrous throw-you-out-of-the-room amount to spend on a software engineer even though it is in fact a mere 15% cost increase and would thus only require a similarly modest productivity increase to be economically sound. Given the way people normally talk about such a thing you would think it is increasing costs by 10x so would need to result in a 10x productivity increase to make economic sense, but that is just plainly not the case.

01100011 6y ago

"Historically", electrical engineers were the software engineers. You picked from a small collection of available parts which met your cost and design goals, and you put up with whatever horrific software tools supported the platform. This was my experience as an EE grad doing embedded SW work in the late 90s. Embedded back then didn't get anywhere near the attention that desktop processors received. Toolchains, debuggers, emulators, library support... all poor. Expectations were low and remained low. They could be, because most embedded stuff was handled by EE folks who didn't know any better and often weren't interested in the potential overhead of any 'better' ways. Embedded margins were always typically tight, so there really wasn't a bunch of money sloshing around to fund improvements. You're talking about an industry where fractional cent savings mattered.

joezydeco 6y ago
Very solid point, and something I should have said earlier. I'm a computer science major that went into embedded by circumstance of working in a particular field, but we were always kind of rare. (I should have gone into CE, which in my school was a hybrid of CS and EE and would have been more valuable). The influx of CS majors into embedded now is creating a new field of innovation and also a new field of problems, like people trying to cram node.js into microcontrollers. But, if you saw the actual code that EEs would write, the past was way way worse.
- 01100011 6y ago
  Haha yeah, I was the young guy working with a lot of senior, senior engineers. The code was often atrocious. Those guys had a ton of knowledge, but software was just an afterthought to them. On the plus side, it kept things simple. Definitely a new world these days.