GCC is undoubtely responsible for at least part of success of ARM, AVR and (I was told) 68HC12. It is not only gcc is free, it is also open source. There is a lot of people continually improving it and in many ways all the part-specific ports benefit from this huge background. The concept inspires other people in creating the other tools (opensource and free, too), e.g. IDEs, simulators, debugging tools etc.

One of the worst toolsets i have seen for a "proprietary architecture" microcontroller architecture was, indeed, GCC based.

As you state "The concept inspires other people in creating the other tools" unfortunately it does not necessarily "inspire other people in creating quality tools"

I have much sympathy for the open source movement, but when you get out in the fringes (applications used only by very few) many oddities appear.

The "power of" the open source movement exist where there are enough people interested in a given app that the quality becomes well policed, that does not happen for open source development of the "Joe Blow mods to GCC to make it compile for the Scrounge processor"

Thus, we are where we started: SDCC which is universal will, probably, work very well because of the number of people interested. "GCC modified to make it compile for the Scrounge processor" probably will not.

It is odd that what I say above about open source is very similar to what I have said about "closed source" in previous posts.


Erik