Need a friendlier way to handle interrupt vector conflicts

Community Suggestions for the Arduino Project
1

Folks seem to be constantly tripping over interrupt vector conflicts in libraries that want to make use of AVR interrupts that Wiring doesn't handle. The common culprits are: NewSoftSerial, NewPing, IRremote, Tone and probably dozens of others. Searching the forums for '"multiple definition of" __vector' will turn up a lot.

There's room for improvement in the diagnostics on these, but it does require establishing some best practices. How about if library developers were encouraged to do something like this?

#if ISR_2_INUSE
#  error Library NewFrobnitz requires use of ISR2, but it is used by ISR_2_INUSE
#else
#  define ISR_2_INUSE NewFrobnitz
#endif

That would allow the CPP to generate a more sensible error describing the conflict straight off, and would lead to less frustration from end users.

2

Another idea is that the IDE could do a regex for that error message (it already does some others IIRC) and then replace it with "Library "xxx.cpp" and "yyy.cpp" use the same interrupt vector" and perhaps do a reverse lookup to find out the pretty name.