Building with a toolchain

[Brian Beuken]

All my demos and samples are built using on target building, while this is effective and allows the code to work or at least compile on a very wide range of systems, it is a little slow, especially on older single or dual core units.

VisualGDB does allow you to install and build using toolchains, in other words, compilers and linkers that run on your PC and then download  only final build executable and resources to your system to then be run. Thats a much faster turnaround, sometimes by a factor of minutes, this is simply because your PC is many times more powerful and can compile files without sending them to the system,

It is however much less portable, and you are basically making builds that will will work for you and your target, and not for other peoples targets. (unless they have the same targets)

There's a few minor things to think about when building on your dev system. 
You have to sync your sysroot. Which means, your PC needs to keep a copy of all the libs and include files it will find on your target, so that it can include them during compile.

You need to be extra careful you are sending resources over your project needs, 

Be aware that no source files are now sent, unless you specify them.

[junglie85]

I've just switched to cross-compiling. However, unlike with the target based compilation, I don't seem to be able to sync resources from my dev machine across to the Pi. The synchronised folders are not available for projects built on the windows machine, apparantly!

I don't see why the tool should not allow copying the files and it's a pain to have a separate process to manually move them across, even with a batch/powershell script.

Has anyone got this configuration working and how did you do it?

[Brian Beuken]

you can set up a sync system in visual gdb, but generally if you have the files named or their types, in the projecg settings it usually sends them over too.

But I can't really be sure I seldom use the tool chain it never really gives me any benefit.

[junglie85]

I found that under the custom build steps settings it's possible to add tasks to transfer files to the target. That was just what I needed.