Concerning bugginess (lack thereof) and upgrade temptation:
I'm currently writing software for a wireless RFID probe and
base station receiver for the laboratory market. The probe and base both
use an ATmega128. Both sets of software (probe and base combined) are
currently over 15,000 lines of code and I'm not even done yet. Before
this project I was using the IAR compiler for the Atmel AVR on othe
projects. Due to cost considerations in "upgrading" their product to use
the ATmega128 I decided to finally check out GCC. At the time, they were
just starting to integrate support for that product. I downloaded the
avrgcc128 beta 2 version and I've been using it ever since without any
problems whatsoever. I'm not upgrading the compiler during this version
unless I have to. I probably will upgrade in between versions of this
product, but I don't expect any real issues to come up. The support via
the list has been great, and you really get timely information about any
problems with the compiler / library, which may or may not affect you.
The only down side (and its a small down side) is that documentation is
not exactly "centralized". If you want an answer, you can find it in
some documentation somewhere; you just have to be willing to search
around and follow different links to find it, but it can be done.
Eric
-------Original
Message-------
Date: Wednesday, July
31, 2002 11:57:11 PM
Subject: Re:
[avr-gcc-list] avr-gcc credibility
<snip>
The trap with gcc (and avrgccc) is that it's tempting
to upgrade every time there is a new patch. Don't do that unless
there is a compelling reason to. New patches introduce new bugs and
new behaviors.
Test the compiler, examine it's output and build
up your confidence this way. So far on this forum there have been
very few real bug reports. That's rare.
Sander
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