simplex:
- Arduino IDE and Arduino Uno (or other boards) are good for beginners because you can quickly get familiar with AVR chips, you can blink your first LED in 30-60 minutes from the moment when you get the Arduino Uno board. Apart from that, there is no other serious advantage.
So, are you saying that Arduino Uno and Arduino IDE are only good for blinking LED's?
- Arduino IDE is quite inflexible. It is designed to work well with the Arduino boards it has in its list. If you want to use Arduino IDE for stand alone AVRs you run quickly into huge complications and the entire programming process starts to look more like hacking than serious work.
Arduino IDE was DESIGNED for Arduino boards. If you want to work with something else, get a development environment designed for that product. It is, however, rather trivial to use the Arduino IDE along with an external programmer to program standalone AVR chips.
- Another problem with Arduino IDE is that it does not have a debugger, it does not have a simulator. You can not run your programs step by step to find errors.
Again, the Arduino IDE was never intended to provide debugging or simulation capabilities, so to claim that the lack of them is a problem with the Arduino IDE is disingenuous.
- The hex file size generated by Arduino IDE is also a problem. A source code that just blink a LED, once compiled, generates a hex file greater than 1 Kbyte. Same code in Bascom is below 250 bytes and in IAR below 100 bytes.
Virtually ANY development environment can give better compiled size if you are willing to PAY for such optimization. Arduino IDE is FREE, so once again complaining that it is not the most optimized compiler is disingenuous.