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Comment by jononor | Hacker News Reader

Isn't the "Mbed compiler" just GCC running on their servers?

I've successfully made code that worked just fine with the online MBed IDE and gcc-none-arm-eabi, I don't recall anything having to be done differently, just more to setup locally (linker scripts and so on).

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I think they've added a fair bit of stuff to it, and are unwilling to release their source, because they don't actually ship the modified GCC, they can not release their changes.

IIRC, most of the stuff they've added are surrounding libraries and such.

It's basically a canonical example of why the Affero GPL exists.

The big benefit of using mbed is there really nice API which abstracts the hardware. The code for the API is Apache, and available on github[1].

Furthermore, you don't even need to use their online IDE to do anything. The online IDE has an option to export your project such that it can be built with arm-none-abi-gcc and make[2], or you can use their mbed-cli tool, which is a python based command line tool, and is also on github[3].

The mbed guys have way embraced open source and working with existing tools, and I wished the community would embrace them more, since I think their API's beat the snot out of Arduino.

[1]: https://github.com/ARMmbed/mbed-os [2]: https://developer.mbed.org/handbook/Exporting-to-offline-too... [3]: https://github.com/ARMmbed/mbed-cli

Huh, I guess that's changed. I remember looking at mbed at one point, and at that time it had no offline option (which basically made it a non-option for me).

I'll have to re-evaluate it the next time I need a little mcu board!

I used the mbed for my embedded class. You can talk to the mbed using the ARM Keil ide and it's so much better. You can actually debug code on the device with breakpoints .

mbed applications can actually be debugged by any IDE that supports GDB, including Eclipse and Visual Studio Code. More info here [1].

[1] https://docs.mbed.com/docs/debugging-on-mbed/en/latest/

The mbed online compiler runs ARMCC - which is a commercial compiler. But mbed applications can be compiled locally using GCC, ARMCC and IAR.

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