Right click on the file in the Project Tree. There are little “bars” on the bottom of the vertical scrollbar and the rightmost of the horizontal that allow you to do this. No editor support for splitting the window – Wrong The rest are matters of opinion where we either agree or disagree You’ve got a few things just plain wrong!. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.Ĥ8 Responses to “An open letter to the developers of the MPLAB IDE” You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. On Tuesday, September 27th, 2011 at 7:21 pm and is filed under Compilers / Tools. Why, after a decade of trying can’t they come up with a decent development environment? It has got to be costing them a lot of design wins when people such as myself cringe at the though of having to use their tools. If I wanted the breakpoint in the called function, I’d put it there myself, thank you.Īnyway, I could go on – but I think you get the picture. In some cases the break would occur prior to the call, and in other cases it would occur after the call. I discovered that placing a breakpoint on a function call was highly problematic. You can forget about looking at 16 bit integers, or other such ‘complex’ constructs. In a nutshell all you seem to be able to do is examine the array / structure in the memory window. However the Microchip compiler guys came up with a decent work around that is quite straight forward to use – until you want to look at the array in the debugger.
The PIC18 doesn’t handle arrays or structures greater than 256 bytes very well. I thought that limitation disappeared at least ten years ago. In a similar vein, I discovered that MPLAB only shows you the values of pointers, and not what they are pointing to. Quite frankly, it blows my mind that in 2011 an IDE can force you to adopt lousy programming practices because of its limitations. As a result, I was forced to declare variables as global simply so that I could look at them. That is, if I was stopped in file foo.c, then the debugger would not let me see the values of static variables declared in bar.c. Anyway, when debugging within MPLAB, I discovered that if I had the temerity to declare a variable as static, then the only time I could examine its value was if the variable was in compiler scope. I’m not sure if this is an IDE or a compiler issue.
Matt confirmed that the simulator was a piece of junk that no one bothered using. Despite the documentation saying that various peripherals were supported, I found that the simulator simply didn’t support them. While I was waiting to get hold of Matt, I experimented with the simulator.
I was just left wondering why anyone would want to debug code without having it downloaded first.
Matt told me that he avoided using MPLAB, but vaguely recollected that you had to configure the debugger to explicitly download to the target. I beat my head against the issue for a few hours and in the end called a colleague who is a Microchip Consultant (Matt). The first time I tried to download to the debugger, I received an error message telling me that there was a problem with the configuration bits. If the compilation passes, it proceeds immediately to the link and download phase – regardless whether you want to or not.Ī baffling debugger configuration interface.It forces you to correct problems in the first file that make finds to process – rather than the one you are interested in.Not only is this really time consuming as make wades through all the files that aren’t relevant, it’s also a pain because: There appears to be no way to simply compile a single file. Do the developers of MPLAB use an editor with this limitation? No single file compilation This is such a fundamental operation for text editors that I couldn’t believe it wasn’t supported. Text editors back in the DOS allowed you to open a file and look at various parts of the file at the same time via split windows. No editor support for splitting the window Thus it’s entirely possible that the issues listed below are a reflection of my incompetence. Disclaimer: I’m no MPLAB expert (and quite frankly after this experience I doubt I will ever become one). In no particular order, here are some of the head-slapping things I discovered. I was heartened to see that the version number had jumped from 6.X to 8.X and so I was fully expecting to find an IDE that was at the very least, decent. It had been a number of years since I last used MPLAB, in part because my experience back then was so painful. Without going into too much detail, suffice it to say that I ended up using Microchip’s MPLAB IDE Version 8.73 together with Microchip’s C compiler. I recently inherited a project that uses a Microchip PIC18 processor.