Is ST Cube IDE a piece of buggy crap?

[paulca]

And the other point is that yes, most software projects are made overly complex for no reason other than justifying software positions.

Where do you get this from?

In what world will a customer pay $1500 a day for a "software position" they don't need?

Please tell me and I'll quickly inform sales.

What I will say is.  When scaling up, its very hard to mantain efficiency.  However, as mentioned in my other post, sometimes you really don't have a choice and the hard way is the only way.

Consider the "Eclipse team working" ideas to Peter-h above.  It should be realised that is only needed when you have more than one dev.  The more devs you have the more efficiency will be gained from centralised, controlled processes.

However, by the time you finish out that full stack of tooling you will end up needed several people just to support it and look after it.

If you don't do that, you end up losing your efficiencies in the dev teams because they start spending all their time fixing and supporting their own tooling.  You can typically employe a platform support person for 60% the rate of a software engineer.  So it makes business sense to not burden devs with "admin" and "boiler plate".

[paulca]

I did consider a sideways move into "Embedded" software.

Did some research and ran away FAST.

If how much you guys get paid has any reflection on how much or how hard the work you do is, your job is easy.

It's either easy or they can find a dozen of you for each post.

A UK company wanted to offer me £30k starting for a "Principle Engineer".  They can honestly fuck right off with that.  Double it and I'll maybe think about it.  I was earning 30k as a junior is 2009!

The best I could find for a similar level was £50k.  However they wanted routine international travel between the EU, UK and US as part of that role, with absolutely rubbish enumeration for same travel.  Still retro grades my salary about  6 years.

Maybe y'all should take a step up for more pay?  I believe in the US the "average" software engineer salary is $100k.

[peter-h]

"Principle Engineer"

Principal Engineer is the correct spelling, so you were talking to an uneducated moron

Embedded full-time hw/sw does not pay as much as server-side coding. I "run" one server, done in Ruby on Rails when that was big fashion, and the rates are £1500/day, which translates to a Maserati MC20 Convertible every year and still leaving you with over 100k to spend on the women you will get Fortunately the code was done competently and despite 13 years of hacking attempts, nobody appears to have succeeded. But most server coders hate their job by the time they get to about 40, because of the constant flow of "new paradigms", so they get little opportunity to use their experience to solve stuff. Embedded is much more satisfying.

For any new server work I specify to use PHP. About 1/3 of the cost.

[paulca]

For any new server work I specify to use PHP. About 1/3 of the cost.

There is a reason for that.

As a test, post anything negative about PHP in a PHP community and you will find them terribly defensive.

This is a sign.

Do the same in a C forum or a Java forum and you will get a much more mature response.

PHP = "Personal home page", then became "Personal Homepage Pre-processor", then they tried for the cool recursive, "PHP: Hypertext Pre-processor".

You get what you pay for   [tm]

In short it's a pig with perfume, makeup and a suit slapped on it to justify "script kiddies" calling them selves developers.

For every short coming of the language there are 6 different "surface layer" and "syntactic sugar" band-aids.  It's OOP paradigm is about as solid as a french fry left out in the rain a week.  It's all just pointer parsing smoke and mirrors.

/rant.

The bottom line advice, profressionally, rants aside is this.

PHP is brilliant for RAD (Rapid application development).  PHP is also known, industry wide, for being unmaintainable.  For every penny you save in the initial dev costs, you will pay back twice or more in maintenance costs.

[peter-h]

That is true only if it is written by an incompetent programmer. As with any other language, you can write it well, or badly.

[paulca]

That is true only if it is written by an incompetent programmer. As with any other language, you can write it well, or badly.

Again.  Programmer singular.  You can do whatever the fuck you like.

When you have 2 it all changes.  I know you have already struggled with this Peter.  Try 5, try 10.

[peter-h]

Are you having a bad day?

[Nominal Animal]

I've written security-sensitive web backends in PHP and Python (and even in plain C back around the turn of the century, back when we had to work around Internet Exploder not handling connection closure/keepalive sanely, with various bugs in browsers' MIME implementations, and so on), for servers known to be basically constantly under attack.  I consider it doable (reliable, maintainable) even in PHP, if and only if I have full and exact control of the codebase.

Working on PHP or Python code, in a security-sensitive context, with someone else who has a different idea about security?  Hell no.  I can show how to maintain the codebase, by explaining the security model and how and why it works and what would break it, but that's just replacing me with someone who does the work like I would, and understands the model like I would.

That is also why I much prefer a hierarchical access controls based on filesystem access model: it allows delegating less sensitive parts to other developers, without opening up gaping security holes.  Pity current webhotels cannot support such, because they're hardwired to the "one machine user and group, one site" model.

[paulca]

That is also why I much prefer a hierarchical access controls based on filesystem access model: it allows delegating less sensitive parts to other developers, without opening up gaping security holes.  Pity current webhotels cannot support such, because they're hardwired to the "one machine user and group, one site" model.

A depressing amount of very useful tooling and infra was denied to us in banks.

They would instead launch multi-million pound internal projects to write their own.

Why?

The out of the box solutions were too useful.  Without at the same time having the granularity of access control the bank simple required.  When it comes to security vs. anything else, security always wins out.

So there were a dozen or two front ends to the platforms which were totally blocked/banned because their user authorisation model basically had "Pleb" or "God".

[peter-h]

I've just wasted 1.5hrs of my life today on the phone to a bank, sorting out a blocked account, blocked for a totally stupid reason related to an account at another bank in the group, so maybe you should have taken that embedded job instead

[paulca]

I've just wasted 1.5hrs of my life today on the phone to a bank, sorting out a blocked account, blocked for a totally stupid reason related to an account at another bank in the group, so maybe you should have taken that embedded job instead

KYC - Know your client automated red flagging based on proximity matching with other accounts.

You probably triggered some kind of "Are these the same person" anti-smurfing triggers.

EDIT I had a similar issue with a credit card.

I used it in the airport in Turkey.  Got home, used it in the shop next door.

Got a text message, then an email, then a phone call that my card was now cancelled and a new card would be issued.

Why?  Because the transactions from Turkey were delayed and applied 1 minute AFTER my transactions in person in Northern Ireland.  The system immediately flagged that I can't possible use the card "in person", "retail" in two counties 2000 miles apart inside of a few minutes.  One of them, most likely turkey was fraud.

[peter-h]

I did tell you that you should have got that embedded job, and then the rest of us would not have to deal with this banking idiocy

[paulca]

I did tell you that you should have got that embedded job, and then the rest of us would not have to deal with this banking idiocy

If we were to swap roles across the board in a sci-fi scenario....

I can tell you that embedded UIs will improve beyond VHS programmers for a start. 

[DavidAlfa]

Well, after accidentally updating to W11 24H2 everything became like a 10yr old pc, slow and laggy.

8-core Ryzen 7700X, 32GB DDR5-6000 and 2TB NVME SN850X, performing like a Core2Duo in 2007.

After 15 days I couldn't stand it anymore, so I reinstalled 23H2, everything was great again.

Regarding CubeIDE:
The slowdowns are caused by Windows defender, you'll notice a huge CPU spike in mspeng.exe / Windows Defender whenever CubeIde is working.
I disabled it, the difference was like night and day.
Opens a large project almost instantly  CubeMX loads in 2 seconds instead 15+.
I also disabled the mitigations.
I used Defender-Remover.

I guess it's time to return to an old-school antivirus.
I've always used Kaspersky in the past, but not sure about it now.

[eTobey]

After 15 days I couldn't stand it anymore, so I reinstalled 23H2, everything was great again.

Lets make Windows great again. 

[Nominal Animal]

After 15 days I couldn't stand it anymore, so I reinstalled 23H2, everything was great again.

Lets make Windows great again. 

What do you mean by again?

(Just kiddin', a tool is a tool.  Eh.)

[peter-h]

I measure 7 seconds on win7-64, 3.5GHz, old 6 core i7, Cube IDE 1.14.1 (never went to later versions), to open a fairly big project, 500k binary size. SSD of course.

Win7 is no longer on the Cube compatibility list, not for a long time, but I think that is just a fossil comment. I would not go to win11 because it forces UEFI (not MBR) and while there are hacks, it is a pointless risk. AFAIK W7 -> W10 is possible while preserving apps.

[DavidAlfa]

What do you mean by again?

I meant
"Everything went not so bad anymore, with a less terrible lag, reduced miserable feeling, less frequent thoughts about bad choices in life".
Still, I left the gun in the drawer, just in case 24H2 comes back, I won't be doing this again 

[peter-h]

Someone else claims to have a fix for the random file opening:

https://community.st.com/t5/stm32cubeide-mcus/jumping-to-random-file-after-pressing-run-button/m-p/789581#M35459

[DavidAlfa]

It's not a fix if you're killing live expressions, they're extremely useful.
I can live with it...

[elektryk]

I like this workaround, especially when you only need to flash target without debugging.

EDIT:

Well, not completely, in my case it now opens startup.s each time...

[SiliconWizard]

That is true only if it is written by an incompetent programmer. As with any other language, you can write it well, or badly.

Yes. Website stuff is not my area at all - meaning not my daily job by any means, but I have used PHP to make a couple websites, both in the past and more recently, and I fail to see why PHP is considered "bad" by so many. It's a decent language with almost all the bell and whistles you can want from a modern language, even OOP, please enlighten me as to what makes it so terrible? I don't get it, but possibly there is a very good reason only insiders can understand.

But yes, it's probably like C. There are more people whining about how terrible C is than ants in my garden, yet it's everywhere and admittedly used successfully on an awful lot of projects.

What are you supposed to use these days for website development if you want to look cool? I think Ruby is sort of dead? Python? Eek. What else? ASP?

[NorthGuy]

What are you supposed to use these days for website development if you want to look cool? I think Ruby is sort of dead? Python? Eek. What else? ASP?

You can write CGI scripts in C if you like C. It's nothing wrong with that.

[peter-h]

PHP is fine.

The reason some people spit when they hear "PHP" is because when it first arrived, some 20-30 years ago, a lot of people got into it without carring much for code security. In the old days it was not a problem but the hacking climate has changed totally over the last 10 years and now these websites are getting hacked. Add to that a lot of PHP stuff being open source so the attackers know exactly where to go...

Ruby is a dead language and people who know it are charging £1500/day. If you are a good coder then you can build very secure sites with it (I "run" one such) but you can do the same with PHP if you are similarly good. I spec new websites in PHP and avoiding "frameworks" as much as possible - for future maintenance reasons.

The fix for the Cube IDE random file opening is not difficult and the procedure has been posted, either here or in the ST forum. But nobody wants to spend time on it, especially not ST.

[DavidAlfa]

I wasn't comfy with security disabled so I restored it... BTW if you used Defender Disabler, you can't simply re-enable it, you'll need to go to Configuration / System / Recovery / Fix problems using Windows Update / Reinstall now. (Win11).

The 30 second freezing when opening ioc files happens anyway, no mater if Windows Defender is enabled or not.
But, it only happens the very first time after opening the ide, will be much faster afterwards.
However, if it takes 30 seconds on a modern PC, I guess older PC owners can go have a short nap!

@Peter-h, if you have an old i7, spectre/meltdown mitigations will have a huge performance impact, I remember my 4770K perfomed like night and day after disabling it.
You can use this tool: https://www.grc.com/inspectre.htm