Using other toolchains/versions is a different story, more complicated and sometimes even impossible. When using the supplied toolchain, things are extremely easy. Most of the commercial IDEs include the toolchain packed in the distribution, and handle the path to it automatically and transparently for the user. In addition to production environments, in research environments, developers usually experiment with multiple toolchains and toolchain versions, to test their programs. Since toolchains developers are quite active, releasing several versions each year, it soon becomes necessary to manage multiple toolchains, each with multiple versions. In production environments, when doing maintenance for old products, to obtain repetitive results, it is strongly recommended to build old versions with their original toolchain version. Why use multiple toolchains? Production environments Generally toolchain path management is an advanced feature, required when multiple toolchains are installed on a machine. 8.3 The installer already updated the system path.4 Default path management in Eclipse CDT.