If you’re like me and have some old projects written for a PIC 8-bit processor, for which you bought a compiler license, you might not want to keep paying over $100 a year to upgrade—especially if that was your only project needing the compiler. In that case, you may find that your old compiler is greyed out in the compiler selection dialog.
Of course, if your source compiles with one of the later compilers and you can live without the missing optimizations, there’s no issue. However, if you require the optimizations available only in the licensed version, you’ll need to manually edit the configurations.xml file inside the nbproject folder. Specifically, change all references in that file to point to the desired compiler or configuration.
to
If you’re not using XC8 v1.21, make sure you match the compiler version to your installation.
Also…
On Ubuntu, installing XC8 v1.21 may fail with a core dump at the end of installation. The crash usually happens when the licensing tool xclm is run (./xclm -hostinfo).
To fix this, you can copy the xclm executable from a newer XC8 version into the bin folder of v1.21 just before the installer runs it. If you copy it too early, the installer will overwrite it, so you need to time this step carefully.
While it’s easier to simply use newer compiler versions, sometimes older versions are required for legacy projects. For example, I still maintain a few projects built with v1.21, even though I use newer systems for new work.