wiringPi – deprecated…

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2021-06-14 19:30:09

The past 10 years or so has seen a lot of changes in my life dominated by physical and mental health issues, businesses coming and going, but also a little fun with retro-computing, arduino, and the Raspberry Pi, and the wiringPi GPIO library I’ve written for it.

However in recent years the Raspberry Pi has changed from a little hacker toy into something bigger and more and more people are turning to Python and other languages which wiringPi was never designed to support – wiringPi was designed to be used by experienced C and RTB BASIC programmers. It is not a newbie learning tool.

I never intended for wiringPi to be statically linked either – and thanks to the incompetence of many people who have done just this, I’ve had over 10,000 emails from people who upgraded their Pi and found that code stopped working because they were reliant on a system (typically some java/javascript/node or home automation or UPS thing) which had statically linked an older version. This sheer incompetence on their part has saddened and depressed me hugely. Hint for the future: If you’re going to do this, at least be prepared to support it.

Add to that the people who have “bludgeoned” wiringPi to work on other fruit Pi platforms, but left my name as the contact email … well, thanks for using wiringPi, but no thanks for expecting me to support your one-shot cheap barely working board. If you want support then buy a genuine Raspberry Pi which will help fund education and research and not some cheap knock-off just because it has something that appears to be faster/bigger/better.