Re: Which PIC18 C Compiler?

From: Carlo (ckielstra_at_hotmail.com)
Date: 07/09/04 

Date: 9 Jul 2004 02:02:44 -0700

In my opinion the IAR, Hightech and CCS compilers are all good
compilers with each one having it's strong and weak points.

The Hightech and IAR compilers are made by companies that also make
compilers for other processors. Very likely the processor variants
have a shared code base and many programmers working on it. This
results in high quality code as a bug found for one processor will be
fixed for all. So these two are professional compilers with linker and
locater as you know them from other environments. Prices are
professional too... :-(

The CCS compiler is a whole other kind of compiler, it is designed
specifically for the PIC processor and is growing with the development
of the PIC family. The PIC processor is not a standard kind of
processor and because the CCS compiler was designed specifically for
the PIC it can create sometimes more optimized code than the other
compilers can.

Which one to choose?
The PIC processor was not designed to support C, for example it's
missing a stack for automatic variables, so any C compiler will have
to create some work arounds that are difficult to work with in the
beginning.
You can choose either one of the mentioned compilers based on personal
favor and available budget. I personally like the CCS compiler, mostly
because of the low price and good support from the user's forum and
quick response to bug reports.
My department has done about 10 different small projects with the CCS
compiler and PIC16 and this worked great. Now we are doing a larger
project with the PIC18 and we are still happy with CCS.

Just one important note: On the CCS website you can download two
versions of the compiler: The latest release, and an older release.
CCS is not mentioning why they offer two different versions, but this
is because the older version is a proven stable release while the
newest release is more like a beta release. Use the latest version
only if you need the new funtionality. For a stable environment stick
to the last stable release, currently 3.191.

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