AVR Freaks

Just as with WinAVR where you could also use AS4 and the two together gave you an integrated development environment for avr-gcc, all that's happened in AS5/6 is that Atmel have incorporated a copy of avr-gcc (and avr32-gcc and arm-gcc) into the installation package so you don't need to go shopping for your WinAVR separately.

You've come back at just the right moment in fact as Atmel had a stumbling/fumbling start to all this and didn't seem to have much clue about how to build a copy of avr-gcc and set up an environment that people would want to use it in. But 6.1Beta finally represents something that is pretty good and now makes a nice alternative to AS4+WinAVR.

The one downside of the whole thing is that they seem to deliberately not want to play the GPL game properly and feed their changes (mainly new device support) back to the generic GCC project so that other users on Linux can benefit from their work. Instead they branched their own copy of avr-gcc and have worked on that in isolation and show no signs of helping the community. This is a true shame and goes against the spirit of GPL but I suppose if their Windows users are happy why should they care? They don't seem to mind the one-way-street policy in the other direction so they recently integrated patches from core 4.7 tree into the 4.6 that was previously shipped in AS5 and AS6.0 which means they have benefitted from work such as SprinterSB's excellent __flash work to replace PROGMEM/pgm_read*().