Re: Just what makes an architecture "C Friendly"?

<fox@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1149439611.900661.171760@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Darin Johnson wrote:
But "C friendly" means several things. When GCC says this, I'm pretty
sure it means "friendly environment in which to implement a GCC
compiler". So you've got several meanings here:

Yes. I think the GCC definition for C practice is expressed by a
growing number of people. I do think it is a stretch for embedded
use, but it is becoming an option more often to take the library
and file system and OS from development platform to the embedded
target with the minimal effort.

I don't live in that space, but I see more and more people offering
that point of view, so I commented that I think C does mean somewhat
different things to different people. I intended to enumerate several
meanings.

There is another thread about the most unfriendly-for-C architecture
for which people actually use C. And architectures for which no
one has used C are probably those that are WAY too small for
something like GCC. If you are working with an embedded
design that has only a few words of ROM, no RAM or a few words
of RAM, no general purpose registers, non-byte address, non-power
of two bus width, no hardware error traps, no interrupts, etc. type
architecture for which there is no C compiler you probably consider
it C un-Friendly enough to not make the effort to try to use C.

And even if you are just generating a small bit of embedded code
for that environment by running Linux and GCC quite happily on a
PC you probably were not thinking of running GCC out of a dozen
words of target ROM.

Huh?

Unless I'm misunderstanding something, we're not talking about the platform
that the C compiler runs on. That's of no interest (to me). We're talking
about the target it compiles for.

As for "it is becoming an option more often to take the library and file
system and OS from development platform to the embedded
target with the minimal effort" - if you're talking about embedded PCs,
fine. Again that's of no interest to me, and I don't see how it's relevant
to this thread.

Steve
http://www.fivetrees.com


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