| ??? 11/11/05 03:43 Read: times |
#103557 - Cost/benefit Responding to: ???'s previous message |
Keith E. Fleming said:
A $1500 C-compiler costs that much, why? Because hundreds--if not thousands--of development hours went into developing and improving the product and that has to be paid for sometime. With free compilers like SDCC, the bar has been raised. I agree. Doesn't mean the bar has been eliminated though. You or others might turn your nose up at free compilers, but you benefit indirectly by their existence. The company that wants to charge money for their C-compiler will have to be quite superior to SDCC, otherwise, who would buy the commercial compiler? Generally true. More competition is always better and drives innovation. This is true whether the competition is free or not. Would Keil be as good, if there were no free alternative? Open to debate, but Keil was already very good before SDCC came along. My comment about not needing commercial software tools is just an evaluation of my current needs. SDCC generates a binary image that is adequate. I measure the program's performance with a frequency counter and sometimes an osciloscope. If the performance is inadequate, I optimize the code by hand. Some developers (and clients) who are doing development on the basis of $100-$150/hour or more are going to probably prefer paying $1500 for a compiler that produces tight code from the get-go than going with a free alternative that might require 30 hours (i.e. $3000-$4500) to optimize by hand. This is even more true if you end up having to modify code that was already optimized... meaning you may have to optimize it again after the modification. Of course this assumes that the commercial software does generate better programs. That's why doing some real comparisons would be useful: To quantify just how much better commercial offerings are (or aren't, as the case may be). Regards, Craig Steiner |
