🚀 go-pugleaf

"Nico Coesel" <nico@puntnl.niks> wrote in message 
news:49bad3f3.1298234859@news.planet.nl...
> Yes, but you'll need to sell quite a few units to make up for the
> price difference between free GCC and a $$$ toolkit.

I would factor it into NRE -- when you have, say, 2 programmers spending 3 
months developing some widget, that's probably $100k on salaries, do whether 
you choose a free tool or one for, e.g., $3k is pretty much irrelevant.

Granted, if GCC can do the job for you, by all means use it.

> GCC for ARM and MIPS platforms is pretty darn good.

Agreed, GCC is quite competitive on 32-bit CPUs.

> Most commercial
> compilers will perform less.

Heck, many commercial compilers are just GCC with proprietary support 
libraries for the hardware in question. :-)

> Another advantage of using GCC is that you'll have one dialect and one
> development environment (for example Eclipse) for all your platforms.

Yeah, there's something to that, but of the various programmers I've known, 
only a small percentage actually used the more sophisticated features of the 
tools provided.  I once had to explain to a programmer that there is more to 
the default "DEBUG" vs. "RELEASE" profiles than just "whether of not it 
#defines DEBUG". :-(  You might be surprised at how many people ship DEBUG 
builds with zero optimizations, symbol tables included, etc. -- I even once 
had a programmer tell me that, "[he] ships DEBUG build executesbles because 
you should ship what you test, and since all testing is done with a DEBUG 
build, that's what we should ship."  Wow.  Although I suppose there is a 
certain perverse logic there that's true...

> This makes changing to/porting to other/using multiple platforms a lot
> easier since you don't have to invest time in learning new tools.

IAR likes to use this line of reasoning to promote their tools too -- their 
one IDE covers both 8- and 32-bit compilers.

Last time I used GCC my "IDE" was a command line and make files...

---Joel