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Comment by beryilma | Hacker News Reader

I wish microcontroller companies also realized this. The amount of shitty development software produced by the likes of ST and Atmel is mind boggling. You can get awesome microcontrollers with crazy capabilities but the software support (IDEs, compilers, HAL libraries, etc.) is invariably terrible. ST's HAL library is a good example: full of bugs, weird APIs, Eclipse-based IDEs, ...

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ST's HAL is so talked about and so complained about precisely because it's pretty good. I can bring up a lot of stuff using their HAL, whereas you should check the similar frameworks from other silicon vendors. They usually are much much much worse!

I don't think ST's HAL is that good, but I agree that the software support from other vendors is much worse, which is why I actually prefer to use ST microcontrollers.

ST's HAL is not necessarily useful as something to incorporate in your products, but its source files provide a lot of details that cannot be found in other documentation.

Writing your own simpler and more efficient code is much more easily done by editing the libraries and examples provided by ST, than from scratch.

I just do embedded development as a hobby, but STM32CubeMX now supports generating CMake-based projects so you can use your usual C++ development environment and workflow.

Thankfully they don't assume Eclipse anymore (but it's still not great)

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