Add new section about using ESP-IDF with PlatformIO (IDFGH-3111)

[valeros]

Hi! This PR adds a short description of PlatformIO ecosystem, tutorials and examples.
Please let me know if I chose the wrong section. Thanks!

сс @ivankravets

[CLAassistant]

All committers have signed the CLA.

[ivankravets]

@igrr, is it possible to merge this PR? Do you have any questions/propositions?

[igrr]

@valeros, @ivankravets, sorry for the late reply.

It would be more suitable to add references to PlatformIO to the top level "Resources" section (docs/{en,zh_CN}/resources.rst). The Getting Started guides are rendered for all versions of IDF, but PlatformIO does not support all the versions, only specific releases. If you are not adding Chinese translation of the document, please add a stub page which links to the English version (example: docs/zh_CN/contribute/index.rst).

[ivankravets]

@igrr Resources section is not a good place for PlatformIO. How about if we add the Third Party Tools section on top of Resouces? The first section will be "Using with PlatformIO". Other software provides can add own tools. Developers will be happy to see that there are alternatives to the official tools.

[igrr]

@ivankravets Yes, at the moment the Resources section doesn't have any subsections in it... If you add "Third Party tools" at the end of "Resources", we can merge your PR and then add some structure for the reset of the links ("Third party libraries", "Useful websites", etc).

[ivankravets]

@igrr does anyone use the "Resources" page? I never use it. I even don't have the idea that an alternative development environment could be hidden in "Resouces". Could we have something similar to https://docs.zephyrproject.org/latest/guides/platformio/index.html?

[igrr]

We don't have something that is 100% equivalent to the "guides" section in Zephyr docs, but I think "Resources" section is the most suitable place for links to third-party tools and libraries at the moment. We are open to suggestions about better naming of the Resources section to make the content easier to find, though.

[ivankravets]

How about adding a new "Development Tools" section? Examples:

• https://www.nordicsemi.com/Software-and-tools/Development-Tools
• https://www.sifive.com/boards (scroll to Third Party RISC‑V Tools)

---

The goal of this section to give developers freedom where they can personally decide which IDE, OS, CLI to use. It's not only about PlatformIO, but there are also other tools that support ESP-IDF, such as SysProgs VisualGDB, etc.

Not all people are ready to install ESP-IDF globally into the system with bunch of extra tools and packages as an official guide recommends. The same, not all developers like Eclipse. The more people use ESP-IDF, the better it is for Espressif.

[igrr]

Definitely, Espressif does have PlatformIO listed on the website in the "Third party frameworks"/"Third party SDKs" section, and we will keep this "Third party development tools" section in mind for the future website update. However the website changes have a somewhat longer cadence, compared to the IDF docs. If you are okay putting the chapter about PlatformIO into the "Resources" section of the programming guide as an interim solution, that's probably also going to be easiest from our end to accept.

[ivankravets]

Ivan, we've finally got your or Espressif position as for the alternative tools. Thanks.

[Alvin1Zhang]

Thanks for contribution, changes merged with bc397f8