Eclipse Based Environment for Multi-Architecture Cross Developments
Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto Eclipse based Environment for Multi-Architecture Cross Developments Flávio Emanuel Santos Dias Mestrado Integrado em Engenharia Electrotécnica e de Computadores Supervisor: João Paulo de Sousa July 29th, 2016 c Flávio Emanuel Santos Dias, 2016 Abstract As the pressure to meet stricter deadlines increases in order to deliver a project in time, hardware and software developers have been struggling to cut the time wasted on activities not directly related to the project. One of tools used to improve the productivity is the Integrated Development Environment (IDE), generally provided by the vendors of embedded system(s). This dissertation looks into the current state of the art of compilers, IDEs, programmers and debuggers on the attempt of unifying the development environments of some embedded systems architectures, under an Eclipse based IDE, thus providing an open-source and operating system agnostic platform that can be improved without the need to directly engage with the embedded systems vendors. A special focus is given to the current status of the debugging tools, since detecting defects is one of the main contributors to the increasing difficulties in estimating the delivery time of an hardware/software project. An additional study is performed on non-critical tools, such as version control systems and tools that generate documentation from annotated source files. When correctly used, they can provide a huge boost on the productivity of a developer or a team of developers. A proof of concept IDE is proposed, proving that the idea of integrating tools for different hardware architectures is feasible and showing that, unfortunately, the weakest part in that integration is the debug component.
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