[Coco] [Color Computer] Re: C compiler for 6809

James Diffendaffer jdiffendaffer at yahoo.com
Mon May 7 00:30:08 EDT 2007


--- In ColorComputer at yahoogroups.com, "twand76" <twand76 at ...> wrote:
>
> Can anyone recommend a good cheap (free) c compiler for the COCO3?
>

To the best of my knowledge, all the C compilers from back in the day
were based on Small C which is usually pretty horrid.
It doesn't support floats, unions, multi-dimensional arrays... and
that's just a start.  The version I took a look at didn't have a
peephole optimizer so the code would be huge and slow.  There was an
add on one I ran across for some version of 6809 small C but I don't
know if  it's the one I found code for.

I have yet to get the GCC compiler that's out there working, mostly do
to lack of effort on my part.  The version I started on was about 10%
complete and I had spent quite a bit of time on it.  GCC is huge,
complex and very poor at targeting CPU's with so few registers. 
That's why I abandoned work on it.

I have a copy of the C for OS-9 but I haven't messed with it yet.  I
don't expect it to be much better than small C do to it's size.

I stopped working on SDCC and it will stay that way until I get a
chance to take a look at what Boisy has done with his compiler.
SDCC was the best option of the compilers I looked at but it still has
a lot of work for the code generator before it will generate a single
line of code.

If you don't mind the limitations of Small C then that or the OS-9
compiler may be your options.  Many of the 8 bit C compilers are based
on Small C so at least some people don't find it too limiting.

For all replies to this topic make sure you check the mailing list. 
People tend to reply there rather than where the question was actually
asked.




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