Guide for doing embedded development in an IDE

[japaric]

We have instructions for doing embedded development from the command line but we are missing
instructions for doing embedded development in an IDE.

I heard that VS Code plus the cortex-debug extension works nicely for embedded development but I
have no first hand experience.

We are looking for someone who can help us write down some instructions.

Tasks

• Write instructions for setting up a Cargo project in VS code including instructions for
  setting up the cortex-m extension, Xargo and the RLS. It could be any other IDE but VS code is the
  IDE with official RLS support.

• Bonus points if you write instructions for getting semihosting, ITM / SWO, register (SVD) view
  to work.

• Identify any changes that we could make to cortex-m-quickstart to make integration with VS
  Code, or any other IDE, easier. Like checking in some configuration file (?).

[niklasad1]

I got debugging in VSCode to work in TockOS you can grab the script for remote debugging here and a very brief tutorial here. Feel free to use as inspiration it but I haven't tried the cortex-m extension cheers.

[Lakier15]

I've been using IntelliJ IDEA Community with the Rust plugin for almost 9 months. It works really well. Only problem might be the different approach from using the RLS.
I believe that they use their own parsing engine.

What really is lacking, out there, is some form of Rust IDE debugging. Rust-DT was a good effort to use the Eclipse capabilities to also debug embedded systems. However,
the project has been abandoned, and well, its Eclipse.... 👎

[LunNova]

Debugging in CLION with intellij-rust works.

[Lakier15]

I thought there were some problems with debugging in CLION.

Anyway, I think CLION is not free. It doesn't have a community edition, so it would not be accessible to everybody equally.

[davidtibbetts]

I've had success with VSCode using OpenOCD and STM32 MCUs on Windows.
launch.json
tasks.json

[AJAnderson]

Hi @japaric, I set up the cortex-debug extension in vs-code and got it working, would love to write instructions but where should I write them up?

[puzrin]

I'd like to point 2 major use cases:

1. I'm a programmer, and i'd like to quickly setup env for project from github to start work.
2. I'm a user, who does not understand anything in programming, but i'd like to flash firmware from some github's project.

Both are important.

Take a look at PlatformIO, it's available as plugin for atom/vscode/eclipse. It's not for Rust now, but solve some important usability issues:

• automate toolchains install for your platform (i mean not compiler only, but programmators and so on)
• simplifies dependancies management (C-specific kludge, not actual for the Rust)
• wrapper to autodetect programmator's port (you should not define it manually, very convenient)
• automates spiffs image build from files in directory

It would be nice, if the same will be simple with rust to.

[mathk]

My experience with ITM was that I would never really know how to setup the TPIU clock from gdb. Once I freeze the MCU to maximum speed (216Mhz) the ITM port didn't work properly.

[japaric]

This issue was moved to rust-embedded/book#12