[fps-hero]

Anyone complaining about STCube has never used anything worse.

My nomination for worst code generator would be MPLab Harmony. I was unfortunate enough to be one of the first victims of the PIC32MZ line, which didn’t have a middleware library, or non-harmony code examples. It was autogenerated code, or read the data sheet and figure out every peripheral yourself. The code generator was so broken even the most basic modifications to get example code running on a custom board would result in non-compilable code. The experience was so frustrating I just respun the board with a different micro.

I’ll never touch any MCU that uses MPLabX again. Bonus points to Microchip for destroying atmel studio in favour of MPLab, now I have yet another family of microcontrollers I will not touch.

One thing I can say about STCube is the code it generates works, and you can always use it as a jumping off point for tweaking the generators code for your exact use case.

One genuine complaint is that the catch all interrupt handling is often too slow actually use, so you end up overwriting the default handlers, or becoming very proficient with DMA.

Another very important thing is to never intertwine your code with the autogenerated code. Keep the application code and the hardware code seperate, and have an actual “HAL” layer in your code. It’s an easy way to prevent your code from getting nuked when you reconfigure, and if you’re not happy with the autogenerated code just sub in your own functions. Best of both worlds.

[glonq]

> Anyone complaining about STCube has never used anything worse.

I would like to cast a vote for IAR Embedded Workbench being worse.