DM-42 and WP-43S

[emece67]

I think that such question should be answered by the core developers. I'm only an aficionado that managed to build the wp34s from information gathered from various sources (mainly this forum) and my own effort.

Not sure if my build system is the canonical one, but I use Yagarto 4.6.0 as a bare C cross compiler for ARM. The other components of the system are MinGW (with the development toolkit and curses libraries), Active Perl, MS Visual C++ Studio 2010 and TortoiseSVN. Incidentally, I needed sometime to add the Qt SDK to the previous mix (cannot remember the reason, perhaps something related to the serial communications in the emulator), but it is no longer in my HD. The firmware is build thru a "traditional" makefile based approach. I'm not sure who manages the emulator build.

IMHO, the yagarto+MinGW combo is used to build the firmware inside the wp34s (and the console emulator?), whereas MS Visual C++ Studio 2010 (plus Qt?) is used to build the emulator. Perl is used in both builds.

As a plain-vanilla user of this build system, I find MS Visual C++ 2010 a PITA. Difficult to install, to manage and colliding with other build systems in my computer (to be precise, colliding with Atmel Studio and Texas Instruments Composer Studio, fortunately I stopped developing with TI chips time ago and switched from Atmel Studio to Keil uVision for ARM months ago). The wp34s is the only reason forcing me not to uninstall the MS Visual thing.

On the other side, the MinGW environment and Active Perl do their job both diligently and silently. In my experience, anything depending on Perl or Python does work effortlessly. Sure the core developers have good reasons for it, but substituting Perl with anything related to a C compiler ring alarms in my head. Evenmore if such C compiler is a huge beast as the MS Visual tool.

As you see, no sign of Eclipse here. At my work there are many hardcore users of Eclipse, but I find it too complex for casual users and, again, hard to install and maintain (although better than MS Visual...).

Time ago I attempted to switch from the Yagarto compiler to the ARM toolchain. Although the system apparently worked (it produced the expected .bin files without errors) such files did not work properly on the wp34s. Sadly I was forced to switch back to Yagarto. Yagarto does the job, but I feel not very comfortable needing a tool built and managed by a single person (is Yagarto currently active at all?). Much more when there is another toolchain (the ARM one), actively maintained and documented, and used by many, many people without problems.

Hope this helps, regards.

Edit. After many hours studying the wp34s code, I have a good knowledge of the huge effort it took to the developers and also that such developers are really capable ones thus, although some decisions they took may seem arguable now, I'm sure they were the right decisions when they were taken.