I am a big fan of things that just work, which is why I have stuck to Coocox and CoIDE for years. But, as it now looks like this tool is dead I basically need to move on.
Coocox had a very good concept and was one of the few Eclipse based IDE’s I liked, so it is sad to see them go. But, I understand they could not make money from their business model and in the end gave up. Their site is now down and I am stuck with version 1.7.8.
Looking at alternatives I find the following:
SW4STM32 is free and supported by CubeMX. I will discuss CubeMX a bit later.
Em::Bitz is free and have reached version 1.1. This originate from Code::Blocks and was previously Em::Blocks that now is forked into Em::Bitz. The drivers supported here are only the old drivers, but you can dowload and set up new ones as well.
TrueStudio is a commercial IDE, but it has a fully free version for STM32 as well. It is also supported from CubeMX and is Eclipse based.
I will be evaluating these options over the next days and share my findings with you. The one I am curious on is EmBitz. This is unlike the others based on Code::Blocks and written in C++. I mention this because performance do matter and I hate tools that forces me to care about Java versions installed on my computer. Why should I as a user need to care about what my tools are programmed in? But, using a Java based tool you often need to do that. The other issue is that C++ developers tend to have a better gasp of what is needed for Embedded C/C++ development. With one exception – CoIDE will be missed. Their concept was good.