Do we need support for low-level development (ASM, microcontrollers)?

[Julian Bäume]

Hey Evgeniy,

On Monday 02 March 2009 12:27:39 Evgeniy Ivanov wrote:
> Now I returned to university (a kind of return...) so started Computer
> Architecture course and have to write some ASM code for intel 8051. The
> problem I faced (in linux...) is that it's a MCU so emulation is required
> (and surely special debugger) and I didn't find any good UI (SDCC has all
> things except UI). In windows I used keil.
I experienced the same situation some years ago...

> I think about writing project application to SoC, but still not sure I will
> (even if no, there will be a chance I will get some free time in summer).
> But anywhere do you think it (MCU support) can become a project for KD?
I'd really love to see MCU support comming ;) Let me explain something more 
here:
I work on a KDE4 port of KTechLab, that is supposed to be an IDE for 
electronic circuits and MCU. The last couple of weeks I reimplemented (and 
also copied a lot) a KDevelop shell to fit in for KTechLab developing. This 
still needs some polishing, but I'm getting closer to what it should be like. 
After finishing the port to a kdevplatform infrastructure, I thought about 
implementing the language support we need for KTechLab. No work is done in 
this area for now, except some ideas, that we need stuff like this. So I'd 
really love to see something like this in KDevelop ;D There already is some 
kind of support for PIC MCUs written in C, ASM and "microbe", a basic like 
language but I love to see them as KDevelop/KTechLab extensions later.

> As I understand we have some libraries used to implement C++ debugging, and
> thing I talk about requires switching from gdb --> sdcdb plus some minor UI
> to show MCU's registers).
That's exactly what I thought. There is avr-gdb (AVR MCUs), gpsim  (PIC MCUs) 
has possibilities to connect to gdb and the languages are quite common (ASM 
and C). With tools like that, it should be possible to implement simulation 
for MCUs into KTechLab based on gdb output. I haven't looked very deep into 
all this, but I keep these things in mind for later development.

bye then
julian
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