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Comment by zajio1am | Hacker News Reader

Which is sad, considering how bad is ESP32 documentation compared to other microcontrollers.

While I do agree with you, I haven't found the lack of depth in register-level documentation too limiting. On the other hand, I find esp-idf much easier to use than STM32 HAL library and a lot easier to integrate in projects (I do like cmake).

Gotta say, I just don't understand STM32's "HAL". ST's headers has proper macros (and structs IIRC), and it's so much more readable by just using those macros rather than the weird indirection library which is still a 1:1 match with hardware registers

HAL is designed to work with their code generator across product families. It suffers from design mistakes that can't be fixed. Their LL library provides a lower degree of abstraction while still affording ease of migration and is harder for them to screw up.

Definitely agree on the HAL. I didn't find the ESP32 docs too lacking though (for UART etc; for Wifi/BLE docs are non-existent of course).

With STM32 they often have 3+ different kinds of timers (advanced, basic, sometimes also low-power). Instead of having one chapter about all of them and saying this and that feature is only available in TIM1, they will copy&paste the 100+ pages chapter for every kind of timer... They must be auto-generating this stuff somehow.

edit: The NRF52 docs and architecture are much nicer than both (the registers seem to be designed by a programmer not a hardware person).

Turns out good documentation doesn't help anyone if they can't buy the thing eh?

What documentation? (RTOS source code doesn't count!)

Everybody has their preference. But none of them are well documented. And all BSPs are buggy messes.

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