Ask HN: Why does STM32 (or embedded generally) development suck?
Started looking into embedded Zig. Looks promising but still not there, not a ton of hardware support yet.
Allergic to getting close to C++ due to all it's baggage, decide to start getting into C. Learning C was easy so started to look into getting my stuff onto a chip, again using the Discovery as my base board.
Have a slew of IDE choices, STM32CubeMX, Keil uV, various VSCode extensions. All of them are quite complex and when you get them working, they lay down A TON of files that seem somewhat irrelevant (and noisy) to creating simple programs.
The HALs are confusing so want to just leverage CMSIS and bit bang my way to greatness. ARM has system CMSIS but vendors have vendor-specific CMSIS, so (finding them) and piecing them together sucks.
Oh then you need linkers and startup scripts, where are those? Again, vendor specific that the CubeMX or uV basically pull from STM32's Github org. That org btw, tons of repos of stuff that isn't super obvious what is what, what should be used with what, etc.
Now you have what you need but you need to then flash the chip, again a couple different ways to do this.
I just want a utility that plunks down the necessary CMSIS, linker and startup so I can get my base level bearing and actually do development...why is there so much noise and cruft everywhere?