Vitaliy wrote:
> So I'm wondering if people can share their experiences using third party 
> compilers for the PIC18: SDCC, CCS, HI-TECH, CC8E, BoostC, mikroC, IAR (any 
> others I've missed?)

I evaluated a bunch of these a few years ago.  At the time I wanted a 
very low cost entry-level compiler, with a good upgrade option.  I 
eliminated several because they didn't have a demo/low-cost version, or 
because the demo didn't support the particular chip I was using at that 
time.  Not very relevant criteria now, or probably for you.

So the two I spent serious time with were BoostC and mikroC, with a 
little attention to PICC.  I chose Boost.  So my comments on mikroC may 
be out of date.

Both have their own IDE as well as the compiler.  Both have simulators 
with their IDEs, and neither of them was usable for me - crashes or too 
many unimplemented chip features.  I use MPLAB's simulator instead.

There seems to be no real standardization among PIC C compilers on the 
syntax for things like direct bit access; Boost uses "register.BIT". 
All of them seem pretty equivalent, but the differences make porting 
annoying.

BoostC covers both PIC16 and PIC18.

> Specifically,
> 
> - How stable is it (bugs)?

Boost: Fairly stable, but I have encountered bugs periodically, 
including one recently that screwed up bank switching.  Took a long time 
to track it down to their linker.  Took several days to get a fix; don't 
know whether that counts as slow or fast - but this was a pretty tough 
bug, and they did send me a version to test before they released the fix 
generally.

mikroC (and I think I also tried mikroPascal) seemed very buggy at the time.

> - How well does it integrate with MPLAB?

BoostC: Quite well with one big hole.  Variable browsing in the 
simulator works well, which is the hard part; the ability to compile 
just a changed file ("make logic") is missing, which seems like it 
should be the easy part!  So, for multi-file projects, not really usable 
under MPLAB for normal development.

mikroC: Don't remember if it's possible.

> - How good are the libraries?

Both have decent libraries for serial, LCD, 1-wire, etc; mikro has the 
edge in breadth, I think (e.g., support for the PS/2 keyboard/mouse 
serial, some sound, some USB), but aren't very deep.

Boost has a floating-point library, and an RTOS (separate license, I think).

> - How does its performance compare to the C18, and other compilers?

Speed of compiler: mikroC - don't remember.

Speed/size of output code: mikroC was just dreadful; generated code was 
twice the size of PICC Lite's, e.g.  Boost's optimizer seems fairly 
good; there are still places where I can do better by hand, but that 
doesn't surprise me.  Support for the "inline" keyword and for a 
software stack helps.

> RUMORS
> - BoostC has slow compilation times

Certainly under MPLAB, because of the make issue.  Doesn't seem terribly 
slow otherwise, though I don't have any concrete, recent experience with 
other compilers for comparison.

In general, I'm happy with BoostC, and it's quite reasonably priced.
-- 
Timothy J. Weber
http://timothyweber.org
-- 
http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive
View/change your membership options at
http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist