ESP8266 Community Forum

A welcome direction has been the move from assembler coding to higher level language coding.
Yes assembler was cryptic and difficult for the actual coder of the assembler to accurately understand the code just written.
Sure assembler was as close to machine instructions as you could get and had the opportunity to be very efficient but it was wasted in that the code maintenance was the least efficient.
An unpleasant trend in the assembler direction are make files. Yes make files are as arcane as assembler. The build of a working esp8266 application is as assembler like as anyone could come up with.
Make files are the new assembler, good enough for compiling but very unpleasant in every other respect.

if you think Makefiles are convoluted then you need to get out of the programming game. how else do you want to do it - batch files or pointy-clicky IDE's? if you want hand-holding try a spark core.

you can go from nothing to compiling your own firmware and flashing it in 4 steps:



making any modifications to the code that you want (and adding toolchain to your $PATH) between 3 & 4.

not hard is it, and certainly a long way from assembler, which has nothing to do with makefiles.

Well I did get out of the managing of hundreds of coders a decade or two ago. As major shareholder in our software company I was able to retire at a young age when we went public in the 80's
The assembler to make files is an analogy of course we know that they are different.
Anyone caring to watch a compile in the console window of eclipse will be aware of the complexity of a compile.
Anyone experiencing a failed compile will be aware of the dependency issues within the large number of components.
Anyway it is an observation so if more complexity in the internals of make files gives you joy then so be it.
On the other hand some may agree with me that complexity leads to unreliability.
A number of postings to this board concern failed compiles and solutions often lead to fixing errors within make files that result form unreliability in versioning.
Anyway I've said enough on this issue

the makefiles from espressif (like the rest of their code) are crap. doesn't mean that other people like nodemcu and esp-open-sdk can't write easy makefiles. you're just using the wrong toolchain/instructions and complicating things further by using eclipse - who needs an IDE to write code for a microcontroller with ~100k ram?