After three years of alpha and beta testing, the Arduino community, which develops a series of open-source microcontroller boards, has released the stable version of the Arduino IDE 2.0 integrated development environment. This IDE provides an interface for coding, compiling, uploading firmware to hardware, and interacting with boards during debugging. Firmware development is done in a specially designed programming language resembling C, allowing quick program creation for microcontrollers. The IDE's interface code is written in TypeScript (a typed version of JavaScript), and the backend is implemented in Go. The source code is distributed under the AGPLv3 license. Ready-made packages for Linux, Windows, and macOS have been prepared.
The Arduino IDE 2.x branch is a completely new project with no code overlap with Arduino IDE 1.x. It uses the Eclipse Theia code editor as its foundation, and the desktop application is built with the Electron platform (Arduino IDE 1.x was written in Java). Logic related to compiling, debugging, and uploading firmware has been moved to a separate background process called arduino-cli. The interface has been preserved as much as possible in a familiar format for users while being modernized. Users of Arduino 1.x are given the opportunity to upgrade to the new branch, converting existing boards and function libraries.
Among the most noticeable changes for users:
- A faster, more responsive, and modern-looking interface with multiple information display modes.
- Support for autocompletion of function and variable names based on existing code and connected libraries. Error notifications during typing. Operations related to semantic parsing have been moved to a component that supports the LSP (Language Server Protocol).
- Code navigation tools. The context menu shown when right-clicking on a function or variable provides links to navigate to the line where the selected function or variable is defined.
- Built-in debugger, supporting live debugging and the ability to use breakpoints.
- Support for dark mode.
- For people working on projects across different computers, support for cloud saving in Arduino Cloud has been added. On systems where Arduino IDE 2 is not installed, there is the option to edit code using the Arduino Web Editor web interface, which also supports offline mode.
- New board and library managers.
- Git integration.
- Serial Port Monitoring System (Serial Monitor).
- Plotter, allowing the display of returned board variables and other data in the form of a visual graph. Simultaneous viewing of output in text form and as a graph is possible.
- Built-in mechanism for checking and delivering updates.
Source: opennet.ru
