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by rstevens24 2059 days ago
Author here. Wow, I wrote this article back in college and I was really surprised to see it up here on HN! Pretty cool to see so many talented embedded folks reading my "write to learn" piece :)

This blog post was the start of me figuring out the love of diving in deep to embedded development. Since then, I built a patient monitor device using this makefile-driven build approach. Nowadays, I am re-writing this device using embedded Rust. It has been such a great experience watching the embedded Rust space grow and mature over the years; it wasn't the case several years ago, but now I can build a complex embedded system using stable Rust! I've even got on-device unit tests working, and it's still the same terminal-driven, vim-based workflow I've gotten so familiar with.
2 comments
biggerfisch 2059 days ago
Did the toolchain you were working on support both GCC and Clang? I ask because I was recently trying to work on a ESP32 project in vim and got stuck hard on YouCompleteMe only using a clangd-based completer while the project was only compileable with a GCC-based toolchain, leading to annoying things like headers not being found due to things like `#if GCC...` (or the like), and also not all cli switches matching up.

Any tips on getting completion working in vim for GCC-only CXX projects is highly appreciated...

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rstevens24 2057 days ago
In my case, I don't believe I had any GCC-only restrictions for the STM32F4 chip I was developing on, so I didn't ever run into this issue.

That being said, it's always worth experimenting with flags in YCM or clangd to see if you can get something working well enough for most development needs. I would take a look at the places where those `#ifdef GCC` macros are used and see if you can spoof the flags enough to get something workable. Throwing a `-DGCC` in your YCM flags, worst case scenario, will just raise an error message and you can remove it. Best case scenario, it won't behave quite the same as GCC but you can get basic linting, autocomplete etc. working. Sometimes this stuff requires a bit of exploration to get working the first time, but once you get a working setup it's very satisfying!

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ducktective 2059 days ago
Hi Reece! Love your work! Also checkout comments here https://www.reddit.com/r/embedded/comments/jgk3o1/embedded_p...
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rstevens24 2057 days ago
Hey, thanks! I appreciate the post :)
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