Not to mention all the free trouble shooting of the software that is
going on in the public sector saving the CW people lots of test money. Could you imaging buying a new car model with the same arrangement. -----Original Message----- From: Corey, Rick [mailto:] Sent: Wednesday, December 04, 2002 10:15 AM To: 'MW Ron'; '; ' Subject: [motoroladsp] RE: Development tools for MCF5307 Ron, I consider it totally appropriate that customers share their perceptions on a public forum, as Art does. We need to share our experiences frankly in order to perform our jobs effectively and be intelligent customers. Furthermore, I agree with Art completely, that I've never used a commercial product with as many significant defects as CW for the 56803. Furthermore, if it were not for the extremely valuable free support that Art and a few others in this Yahoo group supply for your product on a daily basis, my company would have had no choice but to dump the 803 chip out of our design (at great cost in lost time) and start over from scratch with a TI DSP. Critical Bugs: Ron: >> Only one person replied with any reports. << Was I the *only* person who responded? Perhaps we are partly to blame that we only complain to each other, and do not spend the hours of time required to get even an acknowledgment from Metrowerks of problems that we are very aware of. Perhaps that has come about because asking a question in this forum invariably gets rapid, well-informed responses, often with workarounds and sample code, and time spent sending information to Metrowerks does not. My own biggest beef was that "pragma interrupt saveall" did not even put an RTI into an ISR. That may not meet your criteria for a "critical compiler bug", but it does meet my criteria. For that bug to not be listed in large print in an errata list is amazing to me. For it to exist at all in version 5 of a product was amazing. It required repeated Emails and extremely detailed explanations from me to even get Metrowerks to acknowledge the problem. This is not a "finest quality issue", it is a gross bug which could hardly have escaped any adequate testing process. Another potentially critical debugger issue is that putting a breakpoint on a line like if (pointer == NULL) will cause the test to branch the wrong way sometimes. I would not have thought that anyone who followed the messages in this forum could be unaware of multiple serious defects, whether or not they were called "critical". In my offline conversations with you, I've agreed that Metrowerks is probably working as hard as they can to address major problems. However, I am certainly not "satisfactorily and productively using CodeWarrior for DSP". If you took that impression from anything I've said, I'm sorry that you got the opposite impression from the facts. CodeWarrior's poor quality has almost sunk a project critical to my company. I recently got beat up by my boss and her boss for being eight weeks late on a five week deadline (entirely because the CW compiler/debugger is of such terrible quality). Without the SDK, the CW compiler would be completely unusable. Without the support received from this group, it would still be completely unusable. I've gotten infinitely better support from this group, and Art Johnson in particular than from Metrowerks. I've even gotten better support from Motorola for working around problems with CW tools, than I have gotten from Metrowerks. "finest quality" I'm sure that Metrowerks is "totally committed to providing the finest quality development tools available", in your words. However, in my experience, the quality of 5.02 is by far the worst of any commercial software product I've used in 20 years of software development, including freeware. I'm sorry to be so blunt, but I have to take issue with any reference to "finest quality" in connection with this tool. For the 56803, my company is using CW only because it is the only commercial tool available. We keep looking for another vendor, because we need a commercial-quality tool immediately, and Metrowerks has not delivered that yet. If we had known the quality of 5.02, we would certainly not have designed this chip into our current biggest project. I appreciate Metrowerks' efforts to improve their product, and understand how limited resources can result in delays in addressing known problems. Presumably the 5680x family does not have a high enough volume yet to gain higher priority with Metrowerks or other compiler vendors. We're lucky to have an option besides assembler. The only sense in which I was "satisfied" with Metrowerks was that you convinced me that they were working as hard as their resources permitted on many known, serious problems. However, if the Metrowerks attitude is that there are no known critical issues, I am very deeply disappointed and seriously concerned for the future of our project using the 56803. Regretfully, Rick Corey -----Original Message----- From: MW Ron [mailto:] Sent: Wednesday, December 04, 2002 9:06 AM To: Art Johnson; Tom Burrell; Coldfire CPU Discussion List Cc: Corey, Rick; ; Kevin Ackerley (E-mail); Ed Baillie (E-mail); Ken Andreasen; JB Bjorknas; Greg Clark; Greg Coonley (E-mail); Dick Fons (E-mail) Subject: Re: Development tools for MCF5307 I am sorry that Art Johnson has chosen to use a public forum to defame Metrowerks. In the same thread he quoted from there are other letters that dispel these questions about our product. I want to assure everyone that Metrowerks is totally committed to providing the finest quality development tools available. Art has consistently insisted that not putting C constants in P FLASH is a fatal bug. We disagree with this and feel we have a sound reason for not putting constants in P Memory and suggested a way to do this in assembler. Having a dispute over this does not constitute making the worst compiler in history. I publicly posted a message in October to the MotorolaDSP list and on the internet requesting any critical compiler bugs regarding the CodeWarrior for DSP56800 v5.x be reported so we could be sure they were fixed. Only one person replied with any reports. We personally contacted Art Johnson and got all that he considered critical, so we could fix these as soon as possible. Now maybe there are more bugs and there always are improvements that can be made. But judging by the lack of critical problems reported with the current version of CodeWarrior it would seem the majority of people are satisfactorily and productively using CodeWarrior for DSP. We are not claiming to be perfect but it is Metrowerks firm commitment to quality and to strive for excellence. Towards this end Metrowerks will have an update for CodeWarrior for DSP56800 later this month. In September there was another flame war based on our previous version of CodeWarrior. For that I asked that everyone that felt they hadn't been treated fairly contact me. I believe that everyone ended up satisfied with this process, and I offer this as proof that Metrowerks cares about our customers. Based on this real evidence and facts of the quality of our product the number of satisfied customers and the support we provide. I feel quite confident of Metrowerks commitment to CodeWarrior for quality tools. So if you have a legitimate grievance please let us know, Please feel free to contact me personally. I will make sure that the president of Metrowerks is made aware of the problems. But please keep it civil and please be realistic. Thank you for listening. Ron -- Ron Liechty, Ombudsman for Metrowerks Corporation _____________________________________ Note: If you do a simple "reply" with your email client, only the author of this message will receive your answer. You need to do a "reply all" if you want your answer to be distributed to the entire group. _____________________________________ About this discussion group: To Join: To Post: To Leave: Archives: http://www.yahoogroups.com/group/motoroladsp More Groups: http://www.dsprelated.com/groups.php3 ">http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/ |
RE: RE: Development tools for MCF5307
Started by ●December 4, 2002