Belgian Amiga Club

New Cross Compile Toolchain

So this was released:

https://github.com/BartmanAbyss/vscode-amiga-debug

It's a plugin for Visual Studio Code that offers a complete and integrated Amiga Dev toolchain out of the box.
Including remote debugging and the whole shebang.

That's impressive .. and VERY comfortable I must say.

Just fire up VSCode, init a new Amiga project, hit F5 to run it and suddenly a virtual Amiga spins up, running your compiled code and offering a very cool remote debugging bridge right into your IDE.
It's magic!

It uses GCC to (cross) compile.

The IDE is the most important piece of the work flow for me. It's where you write your code and it just have to feel right.
For that reason, editing or writing code on the Amiga is a no go: there simply is no editor on the Amiga that even comes close to modern tools available today on windows/Mac/Linux.

My personal preference still are the JetBrains tools: IntelliJ, WebStom, CLion, PHPStorm ... These guys really understand the process of developing code.
They are not free but IMHO opinion totally worth it.

The other rising star is Visual Studio Code (not to be confused with the heavy weight Visual Studio)
It's biggest strenght is that it's free. 
It's fast, lightweight and extensible.
Good job, Microsoft!

Nervertheless... crosscompiling ... for some reason I still don't like it. Mainly because I switch systems/OS all the time and I like my tools to be completely platform independent.
VSCode is, but Bartmans toolchain is not (yet).
Having a light virtual Amiga around with Sas/C ready to roll feels more comfortable and more "in control" then a magically crosscompile toolchain.
Maybe I just have to dig in Bartmans tools some more to see how they work exactly.  

Written on 22/08/2019 by Steffest


This article is part of the Wanderings in Amiga dev-land blog