Presuming that you have a paid up subscription to the IAR tool set I would strongly encourage you to use the support services of IAR. The IAR tool set is a complex environment and it will take a good bit of climbing the learning curve hill in order to get proficient with it.

In my experience with using IAR tools, for another platform, I can say that the subscription support from IAR is excellent. You may not get instant gratification but the feedback I received via e-mail in was always top notch.

I can say that I believe that the IAR environment is more complex that other environments because of the fact that they have modeled the tool set in a way that the top levels working down (source codes, platform macros and other things) are looking the same or similar for most platforms.

=================

As a general comment I would encourage you to look at your data allocation needs carefully. On small/limited resource MCUs it generally does not make sense to use heap type logic in programming unless you have need of dynamic memory usage where it gets reused on the fly as the firmware runs. The overhead to support this type of memory allocation incurs a huge performance penalty when used on 8051 type MCUs where the number of addressing modes available to access XRAM is so limited.

Michael Karas