MPLAB X a PIC inhibitor! Alternatives ?

[Ian.M]

Microchip bought the Australian company HI-TECH Software, back in 2009 specifically to acquire their PICC C compiler for 8 bit PICs, killing off all other targets, to the disgust of the community.   After in-housing the development team it became XC8, then became the XC8-pic component of XC8 after they in-housed toolchain development for their Atmel acquisition.  It was *NEVER* FOSS!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microchip_Technology#HI-TECH_Software

[Karel]

Microchip bought the Australian company HI-TECH Software, back in 2009 specifically to acquire their PICC C compiler for 8 bit PICs, killing off all other targets, to the disgust of the community.   After in-housing the development team it became XC8, then became the XC8-pic component of XC8 after they in-housed toolchain development for their Atmel acquisition.  It was *NEVER* FOSS!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microchip_Technology#HI-TECH_Software

Sorry, who said the XC8-pic component of XC8 was FOSS?

[Ian.M]

Sorry, who said the XC8-pic component of XC8 was FOSS?

No one of significance.  I suspect that those looking for cracks for it here don't care its not FOSS derived, but at least they no longer have the excuse of ignorance so can <expletive> off and leave this topic to those interested in exercising our GNU GPL rights to modify GCC derived XC compilers.

[westfw]

It does make me wonder about the the state of libc for AVR XC8.  Apparently XC8 no longer uses the OSSW avr-libc, but instead uses their own, "more conformant" and "functionally safer" libc ("Microchip Universal Standard Library": MUSL)
I haven't looked for all the differences, but it did bite people when the initial versions blew up floating point support (since fixed, supposedly)

Questions to ponder:

• Do you get a different (more optimized) version of MUSL if you upgrade to XC8 Pro?
• is it "permissible" to set up avr-gcc (latest, from places other than Microchip) to use MUSL instead of avr-libc, avr-libm, etc?