The terrible PIC ecosystem

I agree with the sentiment, and having a complete open source tool chain for processors was a huge win. But experience tells us that can also be a problem.

Atmel, which was made popular by the Arduino movement, the avrfreaks board before that and its generally amenable architecture to a high level language, was recently bought by Microchip[1], the walled garden guys.

Both had processors that had fan bases, Atmel had open source tools, Microchip closed source. But the guys with the closed source had the cash to buy Atmel when the ARM architecture started eating the 8/16 bit market alive.

What does that say?

[1]http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/20/business/dealbook/microchi...

> I want things I can use in Makefiles and properly script, that are available in my distro of choice and that generally work in the same fashion as the tool chains I’m used to.

You can use the assembler, linker and other tools that come with mplabx in a traditional tool chain, with Makefiles, scripts, and your editor of choice.