Hi Kari

I have been using the MPLABC-18 demo & 18C452 in a project and are
reasonably satisfied with it - MPLABC-18.  My students will now also use it
so I have to buy a few.  Thanks for your input.

Frank Adlam
Senior Lecturer
Faculty of Electrical and Mechanical Engineering
Port Elizabeth Technikon
Port Elizabeth
South Africa

-----Original Message-----
From: Kari Lehikko [mailto:kari.lehikko@VESALAH.FI]
Sent: Thursday, March 22, 2001 3:36 PM
To: PICLIST@MITVMA.MIT.EDU
Subject: Re: [PIC] RTOS and C-compilers for 18C452


Frank,

> How did you conclude that Microchip is the most promising?  I am also in
the
> process of looking for a PIC 18 series compiler - thought that Hitech,
which
> is ANSI C compliant, would be the best.

There are three C-compilers that I am aware of: Microchip MPLAB-C18,
Hitech PICC18 and IAR EW18. I have used MPLAB-C18 for other small
projects for half an year now. I have also tried the PICC18 and readed
all the documents that came with it. Today I finally got a demo-version
of the EW18-compiler and have studied and tried it intensively.

I have tried to port a little test program (that I wrote for testing my
kernel) from ATmega103 to 18C452. Orginal code was written with
Imagecraft's ICCAVR-compiler (a great buy :).

Observations:
- Hitech's PICC18 is a very stable compiler that goes well with ANSI C
standard. BUT... It doesn't allow recursive functions (a 'feature') ->
cannot be used with RTOS ->I didn't even try.
- MPLAB-C18 has the right feel in it. They haven't used any shortcuts to
fill the ANSI C standard. Unfortunately it is still a very buggy
compiler. For example, you cannot typedef a structure that contains a
pointer to similar structure. This causes a type mismatch error. Well, I
can work around it by not using typedefs, but the code would look
horrible.
- IAR EW18 is the most expensive from these three and it shows. IDE is
great and the compiler really has a very professional feel in it. You
can yourself tweak it to make the kind of code you like. It also
includes all libraries specified in 'The C Programming Language'
(Kernighan&Richie), even malloc! Unfortunately the demo version has a
maximum code size limitation of 1,5k -> I was unable to test it
throughly.

Conclusion: (My private one, don't flame me for this...)

At this point I have ruled out Hitech's compiler. I am now trying to
decide, whether I should buy this IAR's compiler or not. If I decide to
try with MPLAB-C18, I'll save about $3000...

If any of you have experience about Hitech, please correct me if I have
understood something wrong... Maybe I have overlooked a special command
line parameter or something like that.

Also, I would be pleased to have any comments about IAR's compiler, if
any of you have used it.

Frank, I have no knowledge of the projects you are planning to use the
compiler in, thus I am in no position to make suggestions what compiler
you should choose, but I do it anyway :)
IAR would be the best, but you could buy several MPLAB-C18s or PICC18s
with the same money. If you like to have a compiler with no bugs, just
'features' buy PICC18, otherwise buy MPLAB-C18... that'll at least work
with your existing assembler code and stuff.

Tonight I will dream about Imagecraft's C-compiler to PIC18Cxxx... :P

Hopefully I didn't offend anybody,

Kari Lehikko (Mr)
Software Designer
H.Vesala Ltd.
Finland

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