[time-nuts] Good (cheap) PIC chip choice for project?

Chris Albertson albertson.chris at gmail.com
Sat May 25 19:03:36 EDT 2013


In general PICs need assembly language for many things.  AVRs almost
never need assembly.   The reason is that the AVR designers studied C
compilers and made the AVR an easy compiler target.

A compiler writer like to have an "orthogonal" instruction set and
some other features.  So the AVR compirrs generate very good code and
there is little reason to resort to assembly

On Sat, May 25, 2013 at 2:24 PM, Rex <rexa at sonic.net> wrote:
> On 5/25/2013 1:22 PM, Bob Camp wrote:
>>
>> If you are going to code on a cheap PIC (the PIC16 series) you will likely
>> need to learn PIC assembler. All my coding on those parts was in assembly
>> language. They are old enough / slow enough / small RAM enough that things
>> like C (or the other high level languages you listed) really don't do well
>> on them.
>>
>>
> Several years back I did a bunch of stuff with various PIC16 series chips.
> All of it, except for some minor assembler tweaks, was done in C. Glad I did
> not know it wasn't practical. I would have wasted a lot of time coding it in
> assembler. Of course my goal was just getting something done, not being
> elegant or very efficient. Time-nutty stuff like TVB's frequency divider may
> require the detail and efficiency only provided by assembler.
>
>
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-- 

Chris Albertson
Redondo Beach, California


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