On Wed, 17 Oct 2007 23:18:58 -0700, Vitaliy wrote:
> Matt Pobursky wrote:
>> I don't think you can get the Windows IDE/Debugger with anything but
>> PCWH. You can always use the PCB, PCM or in your case PCH (PIC18)
>> command line compiler and debug with MPLAB. CCS does have a compiler
>> plugin for MPLAB.
>>
>
> Matt, you think C18 is *better* than CCS? Aside from ANSI compliance
> (which C18 is really not, 100%), what makes it better? From own
> experience, and a recent thread (which I quoted in the OP), it sounds
> like C18 is actually pretty dumb.

Sorry, my point was if you are going to debug in MPLAB then you might as
well use C18 since (last I checked) you lose a lot of the cool debug
features of PCWH when using PCW and the plugin for MPLAB. My experience is
that PCW produces significantly smaller code a lot of the time than C18. I
haven't checked C18 in the past few years so that may have changed but I
doubt it's changed significantly. Hitech PICC generates very good code, as
does Bytecraft's MPC. When I made a decision on which PIC tools to
standardize on they didn't have integrated debuggers and relied on MPLAB.

>> If I were going down this road then I would probably use Microchip's
>> C18 or
>> Hitech's PICC as they are slightly better compilers (ANSI compliant for
>> instance). For me the real value in the CCS tools is the source level
>> debugging of PCWH.
>>
>
> What if cost was not a big consideration, would you choose PCWH? And
> which part of PCWH's source level debugging do you value the most?

I can get C18 almost for free since I'm a registered Microchip Consultant.
I still use PCWH because it's faster overall to debug code for us. Things
like "mouse overs" to display a variable value, display of local variables,
structs, arrays, working with breakpoints, breakpoints inside interrupts
-- generally anything that is tightly coupled to the compiler.

I think with the PIC it's very difficult to write a good C compiler since
it has no real software stack, a limited hardware stack and constant tables
are somewhat problematic. The tool vendors use different tricks and methods
to optimize the code generation and that makes debugging difficult and
fairly compiler specific. It seems that all the plugins for MPLAB are
pretty generic and not very tightly coupled with the compiler. Whether this
is the tool vendors fault or MPLAB's I don't know.

I contrast that to the tools available for the MSP430. They are virtually
all excellent, all produce decent code and most of them are very
affordable. It's just a much easier architecture to write a C compiler and
debugger for.

Matt Pobursky
Maximum Performance Systems

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