I really wish I could show about 70% of the Windows knuckleheads a few Linux tools. And I really wish about half of Hacker News would spend twenty minutes with Visual Studio and Azure. Both sides have no idea what is possible. And, no. No joke.
And today visual studio 2013 crashed on me a relatively low 11 times...
Oh and I had to fix a script that tried to deploy sql server instances and pretty much entirely fucked up my workstation.
This is every day when your product gets large.
Installing an ARM toolchain is simple now. Don't build one unless you really need to (or you install Yocto).
apt-get install gcc-arm-linux-gnueabiBack when I wrote it, in the gcc 4.3.3 days, I don't even think gcc had a release manager --- we're talking clean, out-of-the-box build failures here.
It's gotten a bit better since then, but getting hold of a gcc cross-compiler is still painfully, pointlessly hard.
For ARM it takes 90 seconds in Debian/Ubuntu. I posted the command right above.
And the larger chipmakers will provide or point you to relevant toolsets or include them with their IDEs. Even the large independent IDE makers wrap their stuff around gcc now.
But there isn't a MIPS toolchain. Or an m68k toolchain. Or a sparc toolchain. Or an alpha toolchain. Or an SH toolchain. There is a Hitachi H8 toolchain, but it's based on 3.4.6. There's an MSP430 toolchain, but you don't want to use it, as it's achingly old and can brick some modern MSP430 devices. etc.
Typically, when working on an embedded device, the very first thing you do is spend far too many frustrating hours trying to beat gcc into shape, and that shouldn't be necessary. The fact that the packages for all these things aren't built and pushed to Debian automatically every time a gcc release is done indicates that something is very wrong somewhere...
For me it was Postgres to show what open source was really capable of (a more current example would be LLVM), and Python and SWIG as examples of things that simply don't exist inside the Microsoft ecosystem but which solve so, so many problems. And even on weeks where I'm sitting in Visual Studio all day, I still couldn't live without Cygwin, wonky as it may be. Also: your fears about licensing and quality and some of the other FUD I see in threads like this are largely bullshit.
On the other side, any Mac or Linux dev who prefers Eclipse or Xcode to Visual Studio really needs to have his or her head examined. There's a culture shock, yes. Now give it a few days and deal with it. C# is superior to Java -- much smarter language architects and bigger, better teams, better tech, better docs. F# type providers will make your head explode in a positive way. Azure kicks ass on AWS, sorry. And the sheer depth and volume of everything Microsoft does really can't be understood until you dig in. This is a company that spends $10 billion every year on R&D. And they're the most developer-focused company on earth by far. Also, they're actually not stupid, though you may have to take that on faith to start. There is also PLENTY of open source code. Also plenty of "pay $149 for something with support instead of beating your head against a bunch of snarky bastards on a mailing list for a week" options too for those moments when you have more money than time. Also: all your fears about lock-in and secret API and some of the other FUD I see here are largely bullshit, too.