Arduino moving the PlatformIO way?

The Arduino guys have announced Arduino Pro IDE:

It’s an early version of a new IDE that is supposed to bring advanced features like:

  • Auto completion
  • Git integration
  • Debugger (eventually)

It’s based on Eclipse Theia, which is an extension of Visual Studio Code.

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? What do you think?

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It’s a great award for PlatformIO if other companies adopt our vision and philosophy. This is not the first time when Arduino follows our steps. They did the same with Arduino CLI last year and Library manager. Yes, their tools are simple because their community is OK with “just upload”. If someone needs more advanced instruments or is limited to Arduino, PlatformIO is a good continue.

We never compete with Arduino. We have a totally unique philosophy and it’s fully opposite to Arduino’s. You can see in the Internet how people complain PlatformIO that it is not equal to Arduino and is difficult to migrate. The problem is in our vision on the project development workflow. We have fully reproducible builds declared in platformio.ini, companies can personally decide which OS/IDE to use.

Our dream is to have over 10 PlatformIO IDEs. Not only for VSCode but for Eclipse, CLion, etc. There is no difference for us which IDE developers will use. However, we are so happy that LEAD companies agree with our vision of the next generation development environment for embedded.

ARM also wanted to build its own IDE. They spent 1 year and a ton of resources building their own IDE based on Eclipse. We were shocked, this year at Embedded World 19 they announced that ARM Studio will be based on VSCode/Theia too. See Mbed Studio | Mbed


This is not the news for us. Everything that ARM does, we can see something simplified in Arduino. ARM owes Arduino, Arduino is not neutral to silicon vendors now. They promote the only ARM and force people only to ARM products. I’m sure ARM mbed works so close to the Arduino team.

We have a more bigger aim that just to have the best IDE. Our goal is to be TRUE open source ecosystem for embedded development which is neutral to any silicon or software vendors. I’m sure developers will win from this goal. What is really bad, that makers do not understand that Arduino 2019 != Arduino 2009 where they were open to new technologies, architectures, etc. But, we need a little bit more time here :slight_smile:

P.S: Arduino is a small puzzle in our ecosystem. We support 20 other frameworks and SDKs. The new coming soon.

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But not 8bit PICs :stuck_out_tongue: Support them (particulary the 12Fs and 18Fs , and I’ll be able to use PlatformIO with all the MCUs I have! :wink: :laughing:

On a more serious note… very encouraging to see that the Arduino folks are focusing on a more powerful IDE… will have to download it and give it a spin. Interesting to see the auto-completion is not only basic, but for ‘Arm targets only’?? And while it seems to … work… the interface has a way to go. Nice to see line numbers on by default at last though! :smiley:

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Where did you get this? Arduino does not say officially that they under ARM control since 2017 year.

Just in relation to the auto-complete … from the blog post announcement

image

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Wow! :slight_smile: Thanks that pointed me in this.

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