Sorry Erik, I thought I had already.

I consider the support IAR gives excellent.

For most of the past 10 years, when I've sent an email to IAR tech support, I've gotten a reply within a couple hours. Most of that time I've dealt with the SAME support guy, who knows his stuff. You build up some trust and a relationship dealing with the same person again and again. I'm also happy to say that I haven't done that a whole lot...just on occasion when I've run into something I couldn't solve on my own. I think I only ran into a real compiler bug once or twice; sad to say most of my problems were my own fault.

Note that's with their 8051 compiler, so I can't vouch for their other compilers, but it does give a glimpse into what kind of company they must be to have that kind of stability in their personnel.

I have been irritated at IAR on occasion when in this day and age of computers the folks in their office can't get my phone number and address updated when I send in a marked change with my support agreement renewal. They've also been a bit lax in communicating when new updates were available.

I did get ticked off with IAR when they upgraded the 8051 compiler, I assume to bring it more in line with their other compilers. The upgrade was late coming, and traumatic...a major change where the new version was incompatible with the old version, even to the point where the endianess of stored ints and longs changed, and how bits were referenced. The promised conversion tools never happened, at least in a usable form, so I maintain two compilers, keeping the old version to maintain my old code. The new compiler is pretty impressive, more modern, offers Misra-C support and EC++, so I've kept my support agreement up to date.

I've gotten the impression from IAR on occasion that customer support wasn't their highest priority, in spite of the good support that I've experienced myself. For instance, IAR had a user forum on their website, a poor imitation of Keil's forum. The problem was a single forum for all their compilers (IAR covers a lot of ground in the microcontroller world) so there wasn't as much activity as a dedicated site, and no one from IAR appeared to monitor it. I spent quite a bit of time answering questions helping out where I could, but finally suggested to IAR that they might be better served by supporting their users in their own forum. Shortly after that they took down the forum, not quite what I had in mind.

A mixed review, I guess.

Dennis