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KickC is a C-compiler for 6502-based platforms creating readable assembler code

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Re: KickC is a C-compiler for 6502-based platforms creating readable assembler code

#6

The README says: "KickC is currently in beta, and at times crash or creates ASM code that does not work properly."

It's also lacking support for 2D arrays, recursive functions, etc.:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JE-Lt5apM-g4tZN3LS4TDbPK...

Re: KickC is a C-compiler for 6502-based platforms creating readable assembler code

#8
The 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 stored in the first 256 bytes of RAM ("zero page") and also requires the use of one of the three registers to dereference.

Re: KickC is a C-compiler for 6502-based platforms creating readable assembler code

#10
post #8

The 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.

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