Re: SDCC porting feasibility study, part 1: the assembler

> If you want to do an 8086 C compiler, I'd strongly recommend looking at
> LLVM --- it's apparently got a really nice backend model, although the
> documentation isn't brilliant. Better still, it may be possible to start
> with the excellent 386 backend and cut it down, which should be a much
> easier job than building one from scratch.

Also has going for it that it's got lots of optimization muscle and
opens up other languages besides C (and does C pretty well).  The
project is active.  Should be able to compile itself but is a complex
piece of software and running it natively on a low speed target would
probably require an uninterruptable power supply, to say nothing of
compiling itself on a low speed target or the memory requirements it
would entail.

> - the ACK: has the advantage of being a complete turnkey toolchain and
> compiler, including assembler, linker, librarian, libc, etc, *and* it
> already supports the 8086, but doesn't produce great code and is tough
> to work on.

Minix uses this, probably is more complete than SDCC from first glance.

> - tcc: very very very fast. Produces very very very crap code. It
> started life as an IOCCC entry, and boy does it show.

Interestingly enough, it's complete enough to compile a linux kernel
and the blazing speed (and probably low memory requirements) might
make it suitable for running within small targets.