advice on choosing mcu

On 2004-06-04, David Brown <david@no.westcontrol.spam.com> wrote:

>> However the GNU G is hardly optimised.
>
> I take it you mean GNU C...
>
> I don't think gcc holds many records as being absolutely the
> best optomising compiler available on any particular platform,
> but it is pretty solid on many systems, and is generally close
> to all but the most expensive commercial compilers.  In
> particular, the front-end optomisations of gcc 3.4 are very
> impressive - they are driven by the big users of x86 and other
> major ports,

Fortunately for people using gcc on small uControllers like the
HC12, the x86 architecture is a rather badly designed one with
a hopelessly small set of registers -- thus requiring some
pretty sophisticated optimizations to get usable code size and
performance.  If the x86 wasn't completely crippled by
backwards compatibility with the 8080, I doubt there'd be
nearly as much work put into optimization in gcc, and it
probably wouldn't be able to generate code at all for things
like the HC12.

> but work equally well on small ports - that's an advantage of
> having a clear front-end / back-end split.

-- 
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