On Mon, 31 Dec 2001, wouter van ooijen & floortje hanneman wrote:

> > I really wish someone would port the GCC compiler to the PIC line.  I have
> > used it with 68K variants with good luck.
> >
> > Any Volunteers??
>
> Has been discusses to death. And that is IMHO the only fate for such an
> attempt: the architecture of gcc and PIC as too far apart. As far as gcc is
> concenred AVR or 8051 are almost mainstream architectures, while PIC is a
> strange beast. But luck if you want to try yourself! Be sure to consult with
> Scott first, I'm sure he has considered gcc before thking on sdcc.

There are two reasons I chose SDCC over gcc. SDCC has been optimized for
tiny processors and their built in obscurities. For example, the mid range
PIC's have no data stack for passing parameters or storing temporaries.
SDCC deals with this quite conveniently by allowing PORT specific ways for
passing parameters (I sacrificed recursion and decided to pass function
parameters through local variables). The other reason I chose SDCC is that
I didn't want to support binutils in gpasm and gpsim. I suppose gcc can be
coerced into ignoring binutils, but SDCC again handles this well.

One person has contacted me about a PIC gcc port. However, after they
realized the amount of effort involved I believe they gave up.

BTW, SDCC's syntax parser is derived from gcc...

Scott

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