Re: SDCC porting feasibility study, part 1: the assembler

[Jody Bruchon <jody@jodybruchon.com>]

On 02/27/12 05:05, Gábor Lénárt wrote:
> Re,
>
> On Sun, Feb 26, 2012 at 06:18:55PM -0600, Brad Normand wrote:
>> I've started looking at SDCC to try and get an idea how easy it is to
>> port this to target 8086.
>
> Maybe a bit off-topic, but:
>
> Hmm, I had a bad experience with SDCC with Z80 as target. Maybe I was
> not so smart, but I couldn't make it emit RODATA like stuff, it just generated
> Z80 code (!) to store data, instead of just the data.

I am contemplating writing a new toolchain from the ground up at this 
point. I'm rapidly learning that open source C toolchains are in short 
supply, and the ones that exist either (A) don't target 8086 at all, (B) 
are not documented well enough (or clearly enough) for a newcomer to add 
support, (C) output things in ways that are undesired, or (D) are so 
complex that all ye who enter there abandon all hope, specifically 
thinking of gcc. Particularly with smaller CPUs than 8086, it seems C 
compilers are ill-suited. I am thinking of the 6502, of which many 
systems exist with massive (for a 64K address space) amounts of 
bank-switched RAM; its minimal amount of 8-bit registers and interesting 
addressing modes make it hard to compile good code for from a language 
like C. The 65816 being the 16-bit variant makes it highly desirable to 
port ELKS to (wouldn't it be nice to have ELKS working on the Apple IIgs?)

Maybe what we need to be doing is making a list of the features that we 
need a compiler to support, rather than taking each one in turn and 
trying to jam the pegs in the holes?

Jody Bruchon
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