[Coco] SDCC and other C topics

[James Dessart]

On Thu, 17 Mar 2005, Boisy G. Pitre wrote:

> The SuperBoard is taking too much of my time to do any further work on 
> this.  Would someone step up to the plate and take over this project?  
> There are a lot of people on the list who want a cross-C compiler; this 
> is a perfect opportunity.  Contact me and I will email you the tarball 
> of my copy of the project's sandbox.  It connects to the sourceforge 
> server anonymously, so everything is there to access CVS.

What exactly needs to be done? I've looked at it, and I might be able to
spare some time in April, or to procrastinate while trying to rewrite a
paper I have to present on the 1st. :)

I know 6809 assembly well enough to pull it off, but I'm wondering about
how to decide when to use pcr addressing. I guess if the address isn't a
constant, then it should be pcr... What do you think? We'd want it to be
relocatable, or at least to have the option.

> On another topic, someone mentioned using Soren Roug's os9l1 emulator 
> to run the CoCo C compiler.  I think this is a great idea, and it 
> "almost" works.  However, some of the system calls are unimplemented, 
> and subsequent forks cause the memory that was allocated for the 
> process to not be released, so the C compiler quickly runs out of 
> memory.  It would be advantageous to fix this little problem and have 
> the C compiler working under this emulator as a stop-gap measure before 
> a fully implemented ANSI C cross compiler can be adapted.

Yeah, I've taken a look at it. Reimplementing (or implementing at least
once) the system calls would be relatively easy, and I think we could
probably leave it at level 1 for the use of the C compiler. So it just
needs a more complete level 1 implementation.

James