I've been using HI-TECH PICC for a long time, also, and I find that it 
does generate very nice code. My two biggest complaints with it has 
been:

1) The documentation has had errors in it that have caused some 
confusion. The errors that I found I reported to HI-TECH and 
[hopefully] the corrections have made it into the manual by now.

2) The compiler insists on maintaining pointers in "C". That is, there 
is no way for the programmer to specify to the compiler (preferably 
with a #pragma) that it should use the FSR register for the pointer 
storage only. Instead, the compiler always generates code that 
maintains a "C" version of the pointer (and storage FOR that pointer), 
and loading the FSR register every time. This means that you HAVE to 
hand code FSR usage in ISRs, either with linked in assembly code or in-
line, if you want tight code for your ISR (or other code).

Aside from this, it has served me well.

Douglas Wood

----- Original Message -----
From: Timothy Weber <tw@timothyweber.org>
Date: Monday, August 28, 2006 7:34 pm
Subject: Re: [PIC] Anybody using Mikro Pascal for PIC?
To: "Microcontroller discussion list - Public." <piclist@MIT.EDU>

> Bob Blick wrote:
> >> The descendant of this program - pretty similar, I think - uses 
925
> >> words in BoostC.  As I recall, it was also around 1K in PICC 
> Lite, and
> >> around 2K in mikroC.
> > 
> > Sounds like BoostC and HiTech are both about as efficient as you 
> can get,
> > without user intervention.
> 
> That's been my experience with BoostC - I can usually hand-tune 
> critical 
> pieces in assembler and gain a bit, but in general it looks like 
> they 
> have a good optimizer.
> 
> > When I put LCDTerm on the web I wanted to make sure it would 
> compile with
> > PICCLITE, and noticed that it used about 5% more ROM than the 
> paid-for
> > version of HiTech C. Ram usage was the same between the two.
> 
> Interesting!  Not the way I'd slice those features if I were 
> looking to 
> hook people with the free version, but maybe there was a good reason.
> -- 
> Timothy J. Weber
> http://timothyweber.org
> -- 
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