Is there a comparison against cc65?
KickC is a C-compiler for 6502-based platforms creating readable assembler code
11–16 of 16 posts
Re: KickC is a C-compiler for 6502-based platforms creating readable assembler code
#12[dead]
Re: KickC is a C-compiler for 6502-based platforms creating readable assembler code
#13The 6502 is somewhat famously a hard target for the C language, and KickC does quite well at producing good results in spite of this. The C language is heavily based around pointers and stack usage. The 6502 has a minimal hardware stack: 256 bytes with no stack-relative addressing. So a "stack frame" is an alien concept that requires slow workarounds to emulate. And the 6502 only has pointers in the form of words sto…
The way to do it is to make a C-like language that has types and operators that map easily onto the 6502 architecture. After all, C was designed to map onto the PDP-11 architecture - things like postincrement.
Re: KickC is a C-compiler for 6502-based platforms creating readable assembler code
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
The way to do it is to make a C-like language that has types and operators that map easily onto the 6502 architecture. After all, C was designed to map onto the PDP-11 architecture - things like postincrement.
https://github.com/irmen/prog8
There's also millfork which is a "mid-level" language specifically for 8-bit CPUs:
Re: KickC is a C-compiler for 6502-based platforms creating readable assembler code
#15The 6502 is somewhat famously a hard target for the C language, and KickC does quite well at producing good results in spite of this. The C language is heavily based around pointers and stack usage. The 6502 has a minimal hardware stack: 256 bytes with no stack-relative addressing. So a "stack frame" is an alien concept that requires slow workarounds to emulate. And the 6502 only has pointers in the form of words sto…
The way to do it is to make a C-like language that has types and operators that map easily onto the 6502 architecture. After all, C was designed to map onto the PDP-11 architecture - things like postincrement.
The PDP-11 postincrement thing is very often repeated, and I'm sure there are good reasons to suspect it, but here is one bit of evidence to the contrary I find convincing
Re: KickC is a C-compiler for 6502-based platforms creating readable assembler code
#16The 6502 is somewhat famously a hard target for the C language, and KickC does quite well at producing good results in spite of this. The C language is heavily based around pointers and stack usage. The 6502 has a minimal hardware stack: 256 bytes with no stack-relative addressing. So a "stack frame" is an alien concept that requires slow workarounds to emulate. And the 6502 only has pointers in the form of words sto…
The 6502's stack is intended to be mostly a call stack, with maybe a temporary or two stored while you juggle the registers, not a place for your data frames. From what I vaguely recollect, the cc65 uses Y as the stack pointer, but only when it actually needs stack-like behaviour; at other times it uses static allocation a la Fortran, or so I think.