I had an interesting issue the other day. I've gotten very heavily in DCC model railway electronics. I can across a very nice open design using a ATMEL ATTINY2313. I got in contact with the developer and got the Eagle files and source. I made the board, got a decent AVR programmer, downloaded the latest version of AVR studio and compiled the code. No matter what I did I couldn't get the code to fit in the AVR. The compiler kept saying that the code uses 110% of available micro space. I spoke to the developer and he told me to download AVR Studio 4.9.X dated 2007 odd and try that. The old compiler used about 90% of the micro's space. I think that it is better to create various micro compilers than try to shove every single option into one compiler. The AVRs and PICs have so many variants with so many options that they are bound to overload functions and stuff lots of options into them bloating the code. For example, the fact that one processor can run in 5 oscillator configurations doesn't mean that all the code needs to be pulled in because the particular processor has 2 options.
I think that development environments like Arduino, though they are nice, quick and like Lego, give people a false sense of achievement. It allows people to fool themselves into the belief that they can develop mission critical systems by merely slapping a "shield" onto a dev-board.
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