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Comment by dougmany | Hacker News Reader

I use Visual studio to write c# apps for my day job(love it). My Linux development had been polar opposites of spending days getting a embedded arm toolchain to compile and using vim to make a .c file an typing gcc main.c -o HelloWorld. There is also the whole make file strangeness. Where would you point me to make me like linux development more?

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I'd recommend Yocto to build a system and toolchain for your target, but it's insanely painful to do anything beyond building a precooked recipe for a known embedded target.

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-gnueabi

There's a page on my website called 'A short guide to building a gcc cross-compiler (while still remaining nominally insane)'. It's hopelessly out-of-date now, but it's still one of the most popular pages I've got.

Back 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.

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.

ARM is popular enough that there's a precompiled cross-compiler in Debian --- you get lucky there. It's even reasonably recent.

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...

Use python or go instead.

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