What do you like best about Code Composer Studio?
Code Composer Studio or CCS is the IDE from Texas Instruments for TI-based microcontrollers. It is one of the easy-to-use IDE when programming for TI devices. Some of the pros of CCS are as follow:
1. Easy to program in Embedded C or Assembly language. Provides rich GCC libraries and extended libraries for TI-based microcontrollers.
2. Debugging your program is very easy with CCS. The IDE can recognize your board (if not you can mention the processor name, id, etc) and all the basic debug features such as memory viewing, breakpoints, tracing (if trace hardware is supported in the chip), call stack, etc are easy to visualize. The IDE also provides advanced debug features which can help sometimes in complex debugging scenarios.
3. Compiler optimization is also provided if you want your program to have a high code density.
4. While debugging, there is an option to visualize the assembly code, which can be helpful sometimes if are struggling to find the root cause in the application program.
5. TI provides the TI version of freeRTOS which contains some thread libraries and this version of FreeRTOS can be used in CCS IDE which performs a good job of integrating RTOS and application programs.
6. The CCS IDE is free if you own a TI microcontroller. You can straight away start coding without waiting for any licenses, subscriptions, or purchases of IDE.
7. TI provides tons of tutorials in form of documentation, application notes, and videos for CCS. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
What do you dislike about Code Composer Studio?
Some of the cons of CCS are:
1. Sometimes the IDE tends to hang when your codebase is very big and complex.
2. The code compilation time is slower as compared to other IDEs such as IAR.
3. The usage of CCS has only been limited to TI-based microcontrollers such as MSP430/432, TIVA series. CC series, SITARA, HERCULUS etc. It cannot be used for other vendor microcontrollers such as STM, NXP, etc.
4. TI support team takes a bit to answer the questions posted on TI compiler forum and the answers are sometimes not to the point. Sometimes, It can take weeks just to resolve your issues. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.