Re: [avr-gcc-list] AVR GCC vs BASCOM

[Anton Erasmus]

On 1 Feb 2005 at 12:45, Russell McMahon wrote:

> My first post to this list I think (but there are 1727 messages in my
> GCC folder).
> 
> I don't want to start a 'religious' war but hope I might get some
> measured comment re the relative merits of BASCOM-AVR vs AVR-GCC for
> the AVR family. The BASCOM function library is excellent, although I'm
> finding that things like PWM support don't work on all channels and
> I'm having to rewrite these myself - no great effort but it means that
> the development time in that area is not substantially quicker than
> using assembler.
> 
> I'm using BASCOM plus assembler (which BASCOM integrates very nicely)
> for the ATmega48/88 processors and have previously used it for the
> ATtiny26. BASCOM will do everything I need (especially as I can drop
> back into assembler whenever I need) but it would be nice to know if
> people have some good reasons why I might want to consider using GCC.
> Current project has several real time interrupt driven tasks plus a
> little fixed point 16 bit numerical processing. Also using UART, ADC
> and PWM. Real time stuff is mostly reasonably slow. A 50 uS or 100 uS
> interrupt will handle that well enough.

I think the main thing to understand re BASCOM, is that ALL i'ts advantages
is in it's library. If one does not have the time or ability to write libraries 
with the 
functionality included with BASCOM, then BASCOM is one of the few options 
available. If one has a library with similar functionality for avr-gcc, then 
BASCOM
has got no advantages. With avr-gcc, it is easy to extend and add any further
functionality without having to drop to assembler. One can re-use code written
for other processors. avr-gcc is available for practically any development 
system
in use today. It will also be available for most, if not all development 
systems in
the future. One can archive the source of the specific version one is using for
a current project. If one need to update code in 10 years time, then the 
specific
version of the compiler used is available. Porting to other targets supported
by gcc is possible without much effort. In short avr-gcc has a bigger learning 
curve,
but over the long term stands head and shoulders above products such as
BASCOM.

IMHO of course.

Regards
   Anton Erasmus

-- 
A J Erasmus