On Thu, 1 Aug 2002, Nick Veys wrote:

> > Who offers a free C compiler for their microcontrollers?
> >
> > If a C compiler is all you need then wait a while and SDCC
> > will be ready for you. Meanwhile, you can use Jal, which I
> > understand to be quite powerful. If you're doing professional
> > development with PIC's then buying professional tools is such
> > a small drop in the bucket that free tools aren't even worth
> > considering. (This of course is changing as gpsim, gpasm and
> > now, SDCC are serious alternatives. I'll even fo so far as to
> > say that for assembly programming that gpsim/gpasm is
> > superior in many aspects to MPLAB. I'm of course slightly biased...)
> >
> > Scott
>
> Is SDCC even actively maintained?  And do they even have decent support
> for PICs?  There web page hasn't been updated since last year, and even
> then they only mention STARTING to add PIC support.  Is there some other
> place you are looking for your information?


I can promise you that SDCC *IS* actively maintained. I'd suggest browsing
the mailing list archives. This will give you the most recent information
as to the status. Also, you may wish to browse the GNUPIC mailing list
archives where there's also some discussion about SDCC.

But in a nutshell:

The SDCC PIC port supports the midrange PICs (e.g. 16F84, 16F628, 16F877,
etc.). SDCC is an ANSI C compiler with extensions. (For example, you can
declare bits or specify variables at specific addresses). The PIC port is
nearly complete from a functional perspective. The only thing lacking is
floating point support, division, and mod. From a system level, the only
thing lacking is a linker.

If you care to get an idea of what exactly is supported, you can examine
the regression test files in CVS:

http://cvs.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/sdcc/sdcc/src/regression/

Scott

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