AVR-Chat

This is bound to be a huge thread, ranging from "Real men program in
assembler" to "BASIC is almost like a real programming language these days"

Your mainstream choices are

Assembler (AVR Studio)
BASCOM
GCC
Codevision C
Imagecraft C

If you want to learn how the chip works then use assembler, but from the
tone of your email I don't think that's what you're after.  AVR assembler is
specific to AVR's and not transferable.

If you know C then you won't like BASCOM, which is almost like a real
language now, but is still BASIC and suffers from the "it's quick and easy
to get started but slow and hard to get finished" syndrome. 

From your email you're obviously leaning towards C because you know it, so
you'll want to transfer those skills and your question becomes: which C
compiler?

GCC - Is for Linux, free software aficionados.  It works, isn't pretty,
takes a bit of work to get all the bits up and running, has the stuff the
commercial products have, but not in a ready-to-go hold-your-hand package.  

Imagecraft.  "Industrial Strength" professional, expensive compiler.  I
can't talk much about it as it's beyond my budget so I haven't used it or
seen it used.

My personal preference is Codevision.  There is a free "evaluation" version
that is code-size limited, but good enough for all but the really big
projects.  Even if you decide to pay for it, it's still very reasonable.
Much easier to set up than GCC, has nice code generating wizards that save a
bit of manual reading the first time you use a feature. Lots of code
libraries.

ALL these C compilers meet your criteria, (except Imagecraft isn't very
cheap) 

Good luck

Q





-----Original Message-----
From: markevans_1 [mailto:markevans@iinet.net.au] 
Sent: March 14, 2004 8:14 AM
To: AVR-Chat@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [AVR-Chat] AVR Compiler: which is the best


Ok, I hope this message isnt the start of a huge thread, but I would 
like biased/unbiased opinions on what you guys recon is the best 
compiler for the AVR microcontroller.

Basically I want something that is cheap, ideally comes with a 
fuctional IDE and is quick to code with ( has built in libraries, 
language maps easily to AVR, and is as high level as possible) and 
at the same time has the abilty to do low level stuff when speed is 
required ie: inline assembly. It needs to compile fast and generate 
small code and needs to support AVRs which have no RAM.

Not too fussed about language as long as it meets all my above 
criteria, but I suppose I have some preference to C.

Hope you can help
Mark.



 
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