I am Liew and have been doing micro controller product design for more than 10 years.
I have been using dedicated compilers for individual micro controllers like CCS compiler, PICBASIC etc where things are really simple but of course it stick to a very narrow application.
I starting to explore PlatformIO where ESP8266 wrote so much about PIO ability to speed up the development time. However for a start, I am still at step 1.