AVR-Chat

On Wed, Aug 17, 2005 at 08:35:32PM -0700, stevech wrote:

> My experiences:
> GCC - free. IDEs are from other cottage industry or freeware
> types. Hard to use. Does NOT support tiny memory model for small AVR
> chips. Support is limited to forum on AvrFreaks and often you get an
> answer from an arrogant compiler guru who hates corresponding with
> the little people.  But it's free.  Students love it. I'd never use
> it for a professional endeavor where there are contractual issues of
> project completion and acceptance/support long term. But it's
> free. I've used it a lot.

Wow, what a mis-characterization.  If you've had trouble getting
answers from GCC developers, I recommend you read:

    http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

Also, "hard", like beauty, is very much in the eye of the beholder.
GCC is quite easy and natural for most folks who are familiar with
Unix, Makefiles, and development using a Unix workstation.  Believe it
or not, there are a lot of us and we like it just how it is :-) I
personally have churned out 100's of 1000's of lines of code compiled
with GCC with few issues that I did not cause myself.  Statements like
you've made above do a great disservice to a perfectly good compiler
with a long and distinguished history.  And I find that the AVR
support is quite excellent!

-Brian
-- 
Brian Dean
ATmega128 based MAVRIC controllers
http://www.bdmicro.com/