mz,
While the subject has been brought up. If you’ve had any experience with Linux development in the past. This experience would largely be the same. You do not need a cross compiler or 99.9% of what all is out there, and the chances you’ll need a cross compiler toolchain, and IDE are near nil.
For instance, my own setup is a bit “complex” in setup, but makes my own daily development very simple. I started off with a seperate Debian system running Samba, and an NFS share specifically for the beaglebone. Like so:
william@beaglebone:~/dev$ df -h .
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
192.168.254.162:/home/william/share 136G 51G 79G 40% /home/william/dev
I then use Samba to share this same directory out to my main Windows development system. Where I simply edit code in either Sublime text, or Visual Studio Code. Any text editor that works for you will be fine. But the point of this whole setup is that I have a central place to store all my source, where my Windows development system can access those files as if they were local files( because of Samba, and Windows " Map Network Drive").
Once finished, it’s a simple matter of:
$ gcc -Wall source_file.c -o target_binary_name
Depending on how complex your source is, it may be better to use makefiles, but that’s a subject I try to avoid myself . . . there are all kinds of build tools in this area.
Honestly, in three and a half years. Short of tinkering with compiling my own kernel. I’ve never had to cross compile anything. The above setup though is how one would avoid writing( through compile from source ) to the eMMC, or an sdcard. Which will help keep from prematurely destroying either. Another way, for small projects would be to setup a tmpfs ramdisk, 64M, or even 256M( yes I’ve personally used 256M occasionally ). You would just need to make sure to copy your changes, if needed to someplace safe. cp /path/* target, mv /path /target, or even setup a cron job to rsync the files to another location every few minutes . . . Again, the only limit here is your imagination.
