Re: [avr-chat] the evil 8051

[Joerg Wunsch]

Steve Franks <address@hidden> wrote:

> Seeing as anyone who makes a new application specific chunk of
> hardware (read: Zigbee) and doesn't know squat about micros always
> picks an 8051 [...]

Perhaps this is the part that goes wrong in your decision chain?

> Anyone heard murmurings about a Win8051(Gcc) project?

That's not going to happen, I assume.  It wouldn't be fun to port it.
After all, what do you believe why AVR and MSP430 could find a market
at all?  Everybody was already using MCS51 and PIC anyway.  But
obviously, these ancient architectures have been designed for anything
but not for making it easy to port a compiler to them.

One could of course argue that none of the Intel chips has been
designed to make a compiler writer's job easy and fun though...
(except perhaps the true RISCs, i860/i960).  i4004, i8008, i8080, 8086
-- from a compiler writer's point of view, they all suck.  You'll
constantly find yourself running out of registers.  Add banked memory
to it (MCS51), and you're messed up completely.

-- 
cheers, J"org               .-.-.   --... ...--   -.. .  DL8DTL

http://www.sax.de/~joerg/                        NIC: JW11-RIPE
Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)