>It may be that compiler vendors for micros don't spend a lot of time on
>processor specific optimizations. They know that really performance
>constrained apps will write the juicy bits in assembler anyway.

I guess this also comes down to price and heritage of the compiler as well. The
X86 range of compilers have been around a few years now and through umpteen
iterations of optimisations for the code produced, with inputs from some large
teams of programmers. The heritage and man hours of PIC C compilers on the hand
is minuscule, so I would think that as years go by and more thought and
experience goes into the optimiser then some of these factors would get better.

It also comes down to cost. If you pay $600 or so for a PC compiler that is not
too bad (!!) when generating multimegabytes of code, but to pay the same amount
for a compiler that is going to produce 5 to 8k of code for a project causes the
bean counters to think twice. Hence the compiler cost is held down, so the
development manpower is not available. If team size is small then the breadth of
experience is not there to tweak the optimisation.

I guess if there is further discussion on this it needs to go to the [EE]:
thread.

--
http://www.piclist.com hint: To leave the PICList
mailto:piclist-unsubscribe-request@mitvma.mit.edu