[mrsteveman1]

The other day I was working on a serial command interpreter for the Teensy 3 that will eventually have some Bus Pirate type features. It's just a hobby project, I'm usually writing ObjC or Python for work in Xcode or something else, but I enjoy working with these little boards and writing low level code. The Teensy support software is an add-on for the official build of the Arduino IDE, so I was using it.

After about 5 hours of work and making a lot of progress I was happy with, my Mac crashed and rebooted, which is extremely rare (except when working with something connected via the USB CDCACM driver... sigh).

I then discovered that all the changes from the past 5 hours were gone, the project files were in the exact state they had been when I woke up that day.

Despite compiling and uploading new code to the Teensy 100+ times, the IDE saved nothing new to disk in the process (which on a side note, is weird. Where is the external toolchain getting the changed files from?). I never explicitly hit the save button, so it all disappeared. I spend a good percentage of my life in Xcode, I know it doesn't behave that way. I can't say I remember Netbeans, or Eclipse, or any other IDE that I've used, ever losing work because I only clicked build rather than a separate step for saving to disk.

Apparently that behavior has caused a lot of people to lose a lot of work over the last few years judging from a quick google search.

[wyager]

The Arduino IDE puts all compile-time stuff in /tmp/, which gets erased on reboot.

And yeah, Teensy is great, but their USB code is a bit... out of spec sometimes. Also, the Teensy 3 in the Arduino IDE is (was?) kind of a nightmare. They have a gigantic C++ object that emulates all the registers on an AVR, and translates operations on those "registers" into operations on ARM MMIO.