AVR-Chat

> 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.

This is a pretty incorrect description of AVR-GCC.

Hard to use ? Admittedly there's a lot of options, which you can use to make 
it
work exactly as you need, but that's the beauty of it, and you don't NEED to
use them. GCC works as compilers has for many years back, a simple command
line, and voila, there's your code.

And not wanting to use it for professional use is the most hilarious and 
wrong
argument. Just like many people said about Limux a few years back. Try ask
them again today.
Free doesn't mean bad. On the contrary.
A few years back I was working for large company here, on a 100 man+,
multimillion $$ project, and we used a commercial compiler. When we one
day encountered a bug that stopped us dead, I spent several days to get
hold of someone at the compiler vendor, two days to generate test-code that
they could run before they would acknowlegde it was a bug. And the answer
I got after almost 2 weeks was : "ok, it will be fixed in the next release".
Hooray, that was 4 months away, and here we were 15 persons stranded.
Eventualy, we made a workaraound, it was huge, slow and took a lot of time.
See now, if we'd been using GCC, we could (1) have fixed it ourselves, or
(2) called for help on avr-gcc-list and have Denis fix it in a day or two.
Support is far from limited to Avrfreaks, the avr-gcc-list group is very 
active.