CCS 5.2.1 - multiple issues

Hi,

In the daily course of using CCS 5.2.1 under Win7 64-bit I often run into annoying little problems, none of which are critical but which together add up to a very aggravating user experience. I have decided to list them out here in the hope that some of them might be fixed.

Editor issues

1. Sometimes when editing, the 'delete' key and 'Ctrl-Z' combination simply stop working, even though all other keys and combinations (such as backspace and Ctrl-S) work properly. This continues until I restart CCS. I haven’t been able to find what triggers the bug.

2. The editor has a powerful indexer, enabling things like syntax highlighting, auto-complete and “open declaration”. Unfortunately, in some cases these features don’t work – as far as I can see this is due to two problems:

(a) Compiler built-in defines such as _TMS320C6X and _TMS320C6600 are not known by the indexer and editor. (So a section under #ifdef _TMS320C6X will be grayed out in the editor even though the compiler will compile it.) So for example when including "c6x.h" and using intrinsics, the general ones such as _itoll will be properly highlighted but the processor-specific ones such as _davgu4 will not be, because they are under an #if defined(_TMS320C6600) which the indexer evaluates as false.

(b) If the include path contains a variable like "${workspace_loc}" the compiler will understand it but the indexer will not.

GUI issues

1. When changing a setting (e.g. optimization level) for a single file, a small wrench icon appears on it. However, when manually changing it back to the original project-wide setting the wrench icon remains, even though at this point this file no longer has a custom setting.

2. Occasionally a bubble appears in the Windows 7 notification pane saying “JVM Heap low”, even though I am not doing anything particularly excessive – perhaps CCS should have a higher default setting for the size of this heap?

3. In the Problems pane, sometimes errors from previous builds are still shown even when the error has been fixed and did not occur in the most recent build. These “phantom errors” also show up as red ‘X’ marks in the code.

Project issues

1. When trying to change properties across multiple projects it is common for me to select a project, right-click > properties, change something, click OK, and move on to the next project and change properties there. When doing this, quite often the properties window opens up with the correct header (“Properties for Project1”) but the actual properties shown are that of a different project! Sometimes the properties are correct but then switching to a different configuration (e.g. Debug to Release) shows wrong properties. Also in this case any changes I make are lost and do not affect either project. The only workaround is to be extra watchful, and if wrong properties are seen close and reopen the properties window.

2. Also when changing project properties it is common to need to change a certain build setting in both Debug and Release modes. This is a very difficult task with the present UI, as switching configurations will always reset the view to “CCS General”. Also, in some cases (such as CCS Build > Dependencies) when changing the view any changes made are lost – and there is no warning! The only workaround is to click “Apply” before switching configurations, but this is inconsistent across different property pages (many of which don’t have an “Apply” button).

Build issues

1. Editing the automatically generated linker.cmd file causes a recompilation of the entire project, even though it only affects the linker stage. This is a huge time waster when experimenting with different section placements in a large project.

2. Setting a single file to be excluded from build forces a clean and rebuild of the entire project.

-itay