Recommendations for a C compiler for the MC9S08?

Cosmic C is OK, IAR is not bad either.

Vladimir Vassilevsky

DSP and Mixed Signal Design Consultant

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Oliver

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