Mbed end of life announcement

It do not surprise me. ARM basically terminated all their SW efforts. In my opinion they did them only for making attractive SW hard to port to RISC-V. What a irony that their Bluetooth stack Cordio was forked and now runs mainly on RISC-V cores.

It do not surprise me. ARM basically terminated all their SW efforts. In my opinion they did them only for making attractive SW hard to port to RISC-V. What a irony that their Bluetooth stack Cordio was forked and now runs mainly on RISC-V cores.

What did they do to make it hard to port?

Oh wow, I did not know that Bluetooth Cordio lives on. That's interesting.

Personally, I never understood the logic behind ARM terminating the MbedOS SW efforts the way that they did. They promised to keep it up and then left the community hanging for months. Rotten behaviour, IMHO. I felt that this was driven by corporate IPO desire/greed rather a strategic aim of fostering the right software ecosystem for vendors and users alike. They still do software as they maintain the CMSIS library and MbedOS was built on top of this. So, it seems bizarre.

Personally, I much preferred using Mbed 6 to Mbed 5, which everyone still remembers as it was free to use on the cloud. But, lets be honest here, MbedOS 5 was a chaotic mess. The whole thing was driven by a vision but it was not managed very well. Maybe vendors got cheesed off. Then, I still remember the huge effort they put in to port everything onto GitHub and then getting the whole issue and pull request process up and running for MbedOS 6. They also introduced the Thia-based Mbed IDE, which I liked too. Maybe the ARM dev team tipped in the opposite direction where control took precedence over speed. As things did get bogged down.

So when it all started to unravel, it was the peripheral connectivity libraries like Cordio that suffered most. They never updated quick enough. I certainly could never get it to work properly and I spent too much time correcting outdated drivers in Cordio for my own needs. The documentation was always out of date.

However, I still found it much easier to use than Zephyr RTOS, for example, but I think Zephyr has now finally caught up. But it is spread out far too thin... almost a bit like MbedOS 5... trying to cater for too many dev platforms.

It will be interesting to see what Arduino do next, as they were one of the very few who actually made Mbed 6 work very well. Maybe they will switch over to Zephyr too. We will have to wait and see.