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

Orin Eman orin.eman at gmail.com
Sat May 25 22:52:26 EDT 2013


On Sat, May 25, 2013 at 6:39 PM, Didier Juges <shalimr9 at gmail.com> wrote:

> While I have often said that I have more time than money, I still consider
> that my time is too scarce (or valuable) for assembly language.
>
> My opinion is that the language for small embedded devices is C. Some may
> disagree, but after over 40 years of writing software for a whole bunch of
> platforms (obviously not all in C), I see no reason to switch to something
> else for small embedded systems.
>
> Therefore make sure you select a chip/family/architecture for which you
> can get a decent C compiler.
>
> Friends don't let friends write in assembly.
>
>

I agree entirely.

C is pretty close to assembly itself in a way... given its history where
*p1++ = *p2++; was one PDP-11 instruction.

It's so much easier to get a program going in C than PIC assembly; now
which way around do I have to put the operands to subtract a constant?  (I
had macros to do such things before I switched to a C compiler.)

I have tried a few PIC C compilers and actually paid money for the
SourceBoost compiler.  I look at the assembly output and it usually does at
least as good a job as I would.  If not and it's timing critical, I can
embed some assembly, though the little review I just did showed that the
timing critical parts were in C!

Orin.


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