Best build system for embedded development / cross-compilation

Question

I am doing some development right now using dsPIC, and I don't really like MPLAB. I actually use Visual Studio with a makefile project. I am currently using SCons, which seems to work quite well after finding a useful guide on how to use an alternative compiler . However, I cannot help but wonder if there is a better build system for this? And also, is there a better way to get Scons to do this?

Answer 1

Just use vim, make files and invoke the MPLAB command line compiler yourself.

Answer 2

There are several 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 3

The easiest way to do embedded development is to use your favorite code editor to write code, and then switch to the compiler IDE to create and load the code into the processor.

Obviously, the code editor and compiler IDE can be the same, which is even easier!