Just a story, slightly related:

Recently I bought myself a toy - a small laptop - with some sort of Linux pre-installed. I have previously experimented with Linux, approximately once a year, for maybe 5 years or so, and was repeatedly deterred by the complexity how these guys tend to approach the simplest thing (I do have some old-time "time-sharing" Unix experience but thanks, I don't need that on my desktop just to be able to read e-mails and 8052.com's Forum). But now it seems that at least the basic stuff works as supposed - I plug in a memory card or an USB stick, and it gets automatically recognized; plug in an ethernet cable "hot" and can run FireFox to connect to 8052.com in a few moments - no messing around with .rc files and restarting daemons and similar arcane stuff.

There is doubtlessly quite a lot of work behind this "luxury", but the user requires, demands, needs it - and it took time for the "linux-hackers" community to recognize it.

Now this is similar to these compilers (and the "supporting stuff", including CA). They now need to be nourished by the users, which need to know all the ins and outs, or at least the what-not-to-do-s. OK, the compiler will never "guess" completely what's on the developer's mind; but to recognize that a function is called from an ISR (or an another function) using a particular register bank - or, for that matter, from more functions running under different register banks - and behave accordingly... Let's face it, it's no rocket science - although undoubtedly a lot of hard work.

It appears, the HiTech guys are heading down that lane, leaving maybe Keil behind this time?

JW