Re:John Carmack: Best Programming Setup and IDE – Lex Fridma...
by secondcoming on Saturday August 13, 2022 @05:38AM
(#32448259)
That was not the fault of the OS though, but rather embedded dev in general. Techview (the emulator) allowed you to test your code to a point, but because x86 CPUs were more forgiving than ARM ones you still had to test your code on ARM reference boards (H2 and H4). There were only a handful of Lauterbachs floating around since they were so expensive. Only one team got to see the actual phones being developed, and that part of the building was off-limits to everyone else.
We went through several IDEs, Visual Studio, CodeWarrior and finally Carbide.
I’m not saying the OS itself wasn’t complicated though.
I wonder to what degree this contributed to the eventual downfall of the platform. The learning curve was so steep and the IDE and tools placed so many mines under your feet so relentlessly that it must have driven some talent away.
(An example: you closed the emulator and it left over some running background processes that you had to fish out and kill in the Windows process manager. If you forgot to do that, you could restart the emulator, but breakpoints would stop working. But if you mistakenly killed another important background process, the restarted emulator would freeze and you had to restart the entire Windows.)
On the contrary, I just love working with JetBrains IDEs. The debugging functionality is so great that I feel no one is trying (deliberately or out of neglect) to waste my time. Given that I am 15 years older than I was in the Nokia days, time has become a more valuable resource for me.