Professional GCC support?

[Tyson Sawyer]

An excerpt from an email exchange where I work:

> A tool I just found out they spent $9k on (two floating licenses) called
> IAR says this about language support:
>
> _http://www.iar.com/website1/1.0.1.0/50/1/_
>
>             " Language and standards
>
>             The C programming language as standardized by ISO/ANSI C94
>             with selected features from C99
>
>             Embedded C++ extended with templates, namespaces, virtual
>             and multiple inheritance and other C++ features that do not
>             cause an overhead in size or speed.
>
>             Full Embedded C++ library containing string, streams etc.,
>             as well as the Standard Template Library (STL)
>
>             IEEE-754 floating-point arithmetic
>
>             MISRA C checker for code quality control
>
>             Supports a wide range of industry-standard debug and image
>             formats, compatible with most popular debuggers and
>             emulators, including ELF/DWARF where applicable"
>
> Obviously there is also GCC for ARM processors. I was told IAR was
> purchased because management wanted to make sure nothing was
> holding up <name> in his work with the SAM7x camera controller. I'm told
> we can get support from IAR when we pay that much, and this does not
> exist when we decide to use GCC.

It is my belief that that last statement is wrong.  Can anyone point
me to sources of professional support for GCC/G++ on embedded systems
and some idea of what the pricing structure might be?  This would be
for a C/C++ on bare metal environment.  Most of our work is on larger
processors running Linux, but our "microcontrollers" have only
recently started to be 32 bit systems that we might prefer to use GCC
on.

I'm looking for more than "yeah, someone will take your money".  I'm
looking for something that provides a similar result to what is
mentioned above.  It would need to be support that keeps us on
schedules.

Thanks!
Ty

-- 
Tyson D Sawyer

A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent
of many bad measures.   - Daniel Webster