On Tue, Apr 27, 2004 at 06:33:35PM -0400, Sean 'Captain Napalm' Conner wrote:
> C is a pretty poor match to the 6502 though---not enough stack space (one
> page) and anything you get out of the compiler will probably be worse than
> what you can do by hand in assembly.
I had a toy C compiler for the C-64 years and years ago... I don't think I
tried to compile anything over about 25 lines with it - it was too cumbersome
to use and took forever to compile anything. I didn't know enough at the
time to do any code ananlysis, but from what I learned later on the VAX and
PDP-11 (and doing object code analysis), I can't imagine the 6502 could do
C well, for both stack usage (as you mentioned) and available registers
(unless you used lots of zero-page as pseudo-registers).
> The 6809 is geared more towards C (and higher level languages in general)
> than the 6502.
I'm not as familiar with the 6809 as I am with the 6502... what differences
in architecture make it better? Larger stack frame? More (and larger)
registers?
> (Z80) may produce mediocre code.
Is that inherent to the CPU architecture, or just a coincidence of how
much effort people have (or have not) put into C compilers for 8-bit
machines?
The 1802 gets around a lot of the limitations of the 6502, from these
aspects, but I don't recall seeing a C compiler for _that_ platform :-)
-ethan
--
Ethan Dicks, A-130-S Current South Pole Weather at 28-Apr-2004 07:50 Z
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Received on Wed Apr 28 2004 - 02:54:27 BST