Personally, I believe that cmake should be a useful tool in the Obfuscated C Code Contest.
The problem is, we have had a couple of very talented people making FPC work with these devices as they come out. But they are appearing too fast. I saw great opportunities to use a esp32, purchased a couple of esp32c3 only to find that they use a different instruction set (RISC). A whole lot of work ensure but I lost track of where they were up to due to some health issues.
Yes, I agree and sympathise respectively.
cmake increases the complexity substantially: even when compared with the Arduino build environment. And I consider the -W obfuscation somewhat of a home goal: not being able to inspect and understand exactly what happens when the LED is flashed is a serious flaw.
Apart from the price, the major thing that the RP2040/Pico has is the PIO devices. But somebody's already reverse-engineered those to Verilog, and once you're at that stage the next obvious question is how easy it would be to systematically convert an I/O device specification (e.g. for a special purpose serialiser etc.) to Verilog which some back-of-an-envelope sums suggest would save an order of magnitude of gates. At that point what we need is for somebody- almost certainly in China- to bring out a cheap "stick of gum" board with a RISC-V and a small FPGA.
I've played with the Sipeed Tang Nano FPGA and been impressed: the tools did require registration (hence at some point might be revoked) but you got both Verilog and VHDL and with a little bit of digging can work out how the special-block functionalities are being defined
https://github.com/MarkMLl/tang_nano_as_shipped All in all, an enjoyable experience (and no cmake stuff).
I've played with some of the cheap WCH RISC-V boards which are broadly Arduino- or Pico-class and been impressed. What's more the manufacturer actually responded to tech questions, has made the debugging stream format public, and generally appears to care about "engaging with the community". It was Eclipse-based, but was by far the best Eclipse bundle I've come across.
Most recently, I've been playing with a Milk-V Duo: two RISC-V cores (one Linux, one Arduino-class) plus an 8051 controlling a watchdog etc., plus extra stuff for image classification that I've not played with. I'm not saying it was 100% troublefree, but the level of pain was bearable.
Having onboard WiFi is a big thing. But so it good documentation and an overall "open" design philosophy, and while it is obvious that a substantial proportion of the community is happy with cmake one has to ask how many of those are actually building up projects from scratch rather than copying of slightly-modifying existing work.
MarkMLl
p.s. Working notes available on any of the devices I've mentioned above, although the only one that I've used with FPC yet is the Pico.
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