Best build system for embedded development/cross-compiling

Question

I'm doing some development right now using dsPICs and I'm not exactly in love with MPLAB. I'm actually using Visual Studio with a makefile project. Currently I'm using SCons, which seems to work fairly well, after finding a helpful guide to setting up to use an alternate compiler. Still, I can't help but wonder, is there a better build system for this? And also, is there a better way to make Scons do this?

Answer 1

There are quite a few build systems that you can use:

• Buildroot http://www.buildroot.net/
• Buildroot-ng http://wiki.openwrt.org/
• crosstool-NG http://www.crosstool-ng.org/
• PTXdist http://www.ptxdist.org/
• OpenEmbedded http://www.openembedded.org/
• OE-lite http://oe-lite.org/
• muddle https://code.google.com/p/muddle/
• Poky http://pokylinux.org/
• OpenBricks http://www.openbricks.org/
• Yocto Project http://www.yoctoproject.org/
• Scratchbox http://www.scratchbox.org/
• Cross Linux From Scratch http://www.cross-lfs.org/
• Aboriginal Linux http://landley.net/aboriginal/

Answer 2

The very simplest way to do embedded development is to use your favourite code editor for writing the code, then switch to the compiler's IDE to build and download the code to the processor.

Obviously, the code editor and the compiler IDE may be the same thing, which is even simpler!

Answer 3

Just use vim, makefiles and call the MPLAB command line compiler yourself.