SDCC has been a nice resource for a variety of MCUs. I wish it had support for some of the 8-bit PIC chips like the PIC10 and PIC12... maybe one day!
pjmlp 29 minutes ago [-]
If it has not to be SDCC, Mikroe compilers have support for them across C, BASIC and Pascal compilers, if I am not mistaken.
Joel_Mckay 10 minutes ago [-]
The PIC compiler options were never standards compliant up until around when Microchip purchased AVR. There are great chips now that have free gcc support, reasonable power draw, and 32bit float support (ATSAM3X8E current prices are not worth it in many cases.)
PIC does still have a few key use-cases, but most people will hit the stack depth limits pretty quickly in C. A pic12 Assembly project is fun, but the limitations cut deep these days.
STM32/ESP32/RP2350 or nRF for low power stuff are far less effort these days, and give much better value. =3
dmitrygr 2 hours ago [-]
SDCC has the best OSS 8051 compiler. It is buggy as hell, but it is free. Sometimes that is good enough.
hacker_homie 1 hours ago [-]
I used it for some toy projects never ran into "bugs" as in this is just broken, but it's quirky for sure.
dmitrygr 1 hours ago [-]
when you have large code, bugs will find you. for example two uint16 vars globally declared one after another. adding them together to each other will produce an access to garbage memory after 5-6 additions. dumb code but a simple repro. i ran into its bug when working on eInk price tags a while back.
raphman 46 minutes ago [-]
As a student, 20 years ago, I felt like I was going crazy when using SDCC for pic16. Being new to microcontrollers and C, SDCC seemed cursed - even simple 'blink LED' test cases pseudo-randomly worked or didn't. It turned out that the compiler optimized away some 'empty' loops a little bit too aggressively without realizing that these loops were setting output pins. These bugs have long been fixed but still live on in my long-term memory.
MobiusHorizons 1 hours ago [-]
Has worked well enough for me on 8051 and stm8
fiatpandas 2 hours ago [-]
TIL about Dallas Semiconductor from this page.
Love Silicon Prairie lore.
Rendered at 05:35:07 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
PIC does still have a few key use-cases, but most people will hit the stack depth limits pretty quickly in C. A pic12 Assembly project is fun, but the limitations cut deep these days.
STM32/ESP32/RP2350 or nRF for low power stuff are far less effort these days, and give much better value. =3
Love Silicon Prairie lore.