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From: Dombo <dombo@displosable.invalid>
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Computer architects leaving Intel...
Date: Mon, 16 Sep 2024 22:15:35 +0200
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On 16-09-2024 13:12, David Brown wrote:
> On 16/09/2024 02:00, BGB wrote:
>> On 9/15/2024 2:09 PM, David Brown wrote:
>> This is mostly for the crowd still messing around with a few older 
>> systems:
>>    Commodore 64/128
>>    Apple II / II/C / II/E
>>    Apple IIGS
>>    NES and SNES
>>    ...
> 
> It is not a "crowd" - it's a small group of oddballs and enthusiasts.  I 
> fully support them, and playing with these things is a great hobby.  I 
> would maybe be doing that too, if I had twice as many hours in the week. 
>   But talking about "popular compilers like gcc and CC65" is like 
> talking about "popular sports like football and Inuit ear pulling 
> contests".
> 
>>
>> Also, some newer projects, like the "Commander X16" are also using 
>> CC65 (it was based around a 65C816 being used in a 6502 compatibility 
>> mode).
>>
>>
>> Where, AFAIK, GCC proper has little interest in these targets.
>>
> 
> The GCC community would be quite happy to support such targets, but 
> someone would need to make the port.  And the architecture of the gcc 
> compiler suite is best suited to processors with reasonably regular and 
> orthogonal ISAs with plenty of registers and at least 16-bit width - 
> getting good results for a cpu like the 6502 from gcc would be an 
> extraordinary level of effort.  

I wouldn't be surprised if someone had a go at creating a 6502 back-end 
for GCC. There is a 6502 back-end for LLVM (https://llvm-mos.org), it 
appears that someone put a serious amount of effort into this. I've 
played a little with it (using Compiler Explorer site - 
https://godbolt.org/). Considering the limitations of the 6502 it seemed 
to be able produce relatively decent code from C++ code when 
optimizations are enabled. Like AVR-GCC you do need to keep in mind that 
the target is an 8-bitter and its limitations to get somewhat reasonable 
code out of it.