Recommendations for a C compiler for the MC9S08?

I am just starting to look around at available C compilers for the Freescale line of 9S08 micros, specifically I have my eye on the MC9S08AW part. Does anyone have any definite recommendations on good C compilers for those parts? Any compiler you would recommend staying away from? Thanks.

Lou

Reply to
Mr. C
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Cosmic C is OK, IAR is not bad either.

Vladimir Vassilevsky

DSP and Mixed Signal Design Consultant

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Reply to
Vladimir Vassilevsky

Cosmic is pretty good.

We've used the Cosmic development tools for the CPU08. There have been one or two instances where I've looked at the assembly-language generated by the compiler and observed it could be optimized slightly (but who can't say that about any microcontroller compiler?) ... but one thing I have to say about Cosmic is that we have encountered no bugs. The compiler and other development tools have always been logically correct.

I give Cosmic a solid B+ for compiler optimization and a solid A of A+ for correctness of the compiler.

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David T. Ashley              (dta@e3ft.com)
http://www.e3ft.com          (Consulting Home Page)
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Reply to
David T. Ashley

Agreed. It is pretty good, simple and convenient.

I can't say Cosmic is without the drawbacks:

  1. Cosmic IDE sucks.
  2. Cosmic does have bugs, although not too many. I have burned a couple of times. Once it was with the float point library, the other was with the C syntax mistake that was unnoticed by compiler.
  3. Many library functions are not reentrant.

Agreed.

Vladimir Vassilevsky

DSP and Mixed Signal Design Consultant

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Reply to
Vladimir Vassilevsky

I used to use the Whitesmiths/Cosmic C compiler many years ago for HC11 development and I generally liked it.

No problem for me. To their credit, the compiler also runs in a command line mode which is likely they way I will use it from my editor. I usually HATE IDE's and really, really like my editor.

I wonder how responsive they are to fixing bugs. I know the Rowley Comipler I use for the MSP430 has nice free customer support that is usually fast and accurate. The only weird thing I saw with the older Cosmic Compiler is that it would crash on compilation and if I simply added a few spaces in the source code, it would not crash. It was really a strange problem since sometimes I needed to delete spaces.

No problem, I generally do not write code that will cause that to happen (single thread, no library functions used in ISRs, etc.)

Thanks for all your input. I did go to their web site and the only thing I thought was weird was they did not seem to mention how much their stuff costs.

Lou

Reply to
Mr. C

Not very responsive. The bug that I found was with the floor() function. I send them an example. As far as I know, the bug is still there.

The policy of Cosmic is to match the price of IAR and Metrowerks :) So you'd better check the competitor prices first.

Vladimir Vassilevsky

DSP and Mixed Signal Design Consultant

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Reply to
Vladimir Vassilevsky

Bytecraft seems to generate the tightest 8-bit code for Freescale.

Reply to
Eric

The bugs I reported were corrected rather fast or at least I got a workaround for the time to the next release.

Oliver

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Oliver Betz, Muenchen (oliverbetz.de)
Reply to
Oliver Betz

CodeWarrior is good and also free of charge for up to 16K.

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WBR, Yuriy.
"Liberalism is a mental disorder"
Reply to
Yuriy K.

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