On Mon, Feb 22, 2010 at 5:28 AM, Philip Pemberton wrote: > Alan B. Pearce wrote: >> A UK Microchip rep told me "it is being rewritten in Netbeans" ... > > Rewritten with Netbeans, i.e. in Java?! Lovely. So I guess that means > you're going to need an overclocked dual-chip 6-core Opteron box or > similar to run it in any usable fashion... And don't get me started on > the NullPointerExceptions... > > Three steps forward, five steps back. > The two popular big open source cross-platform IDEs are Eclipse and Netbeans. And quite some people in Microchip forum are proposing Eclipse to replace MPLAB. So I think Microchip chooses Netbeans based on the evalautions of Netbeans and Eclipse. I think they are similar but Eclipse seems to be more popular. Microchip tends to not select the most popular choice. ;-) Eg: they choose MIPS M4K core instead of Cortex M3 core for PIC32. Reference: there are people really really like Eclipse. http://www.microchip.com/forums/tm.aspx?m=477255 It is not clear to me that whether the old MPLAB will be still available for how long. Or will they keep both the old code base for Windows and use the new Netbean based IDE for Windows, Linux, Mac OS X. Eclipse used to be slow but now it is not too bad. I tried it on the 4-year old Single Core Pentium M based Dell D610 (XP Pro SP2, 2GB Ram, integrated graphics) and it is acceptable. Maybe Netbeans is similar. But I think what matters most is the stability of the drivers of the hardware (ICD 3, PICKit 3, Real ICE, etc), the interface module between the IDE and various components. That is often where the problem lies. The best is that Microchip could release more console based tools (like their compilers and some programing utilities) so that people can use whatever IDEs they like. Now there is no simulation and debugger console tools from Microchip. They apparently can easily add gdb capability for PIC24/dsPIC/PIC32 but they choose not to do so. -- Xiaofan http://mcuee.blogspot.com -- http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist