After three years of alpha and beta testing, the Arduino community, which develops a series of open microcontroller-based boards, has presented a stable release of the Arduino IDE 2.0 integrated development environment, which provides an interface for writing code, compiling, uploading firmware to hardware, and interacting with boards during debugging. Firmware development is carried out in a specially created programming language that resembles C and allows you to quickly create programs for microcontrollers. The development environment interface code is written in TypeScript (JavaScipt typed) and the backend is implemented in Go. The source texts are distributed under the AGPLv3 license. Prepared packages for Linux, Windows and macOS.
The Arduino IDE 2.x branch is a completely new project with no code overlaps with the Arduino IDE 1.x. The Arduino IDE 2.0 is based on the Eclipse Theia code editor, and the desktop application is built using the Electron platform (Arduino IDE 1.x is written in Java). The logic related to compiling, debugging and downloading firmware has been moved to a separate arduino-cli background process. If possible, they tried to keep the interface in the form familiar to users, while modernizing it. Arduino 1.x users are given the opportunity to upgrade to a new branch with the conversion of existing boards and function libraries.
Among the most noticeable changes to the user:
- Faster, responsive and modern looking interface with multiple modes of information presentation.
- Support for auto-completion of the names of functions and variables, taking into account the existing code and connected libraries. Informing about errors during typing. Operations related to parsing semantics are moved to a component that supports LSP (Language Server Protocol).
- Code navigation tools. The context menu shown when you right-click on a function or variable displays links to jump to the line where the selected function or variable is defined.
- A debugger is built in that supports live debugging and the ability to use breakpoints.
- Support for dark mode design.
- Added support for saving work to the Arduino Cloud for people working on a project on different computers. On systems that do not have Arduino IDE 2 installed, the ability to edit code using the Arduino Web Editor web interface, which also supports offline operation, is provided.
- New board and library managers.
- Git integration.
- Serial Monitor System.
- Plotter, which allows you to present the variables returned by the board and other data in the form of a visual graph. It is possible to simultaneously view the output in text form and as a graph.
- Built-in mechanism for checking and delivering updates.
Source: opennet.ru