| ??? 07/21/09 14:01 Read: times |
#167656 - It's not quite like that ... Responding to: ???'s previous message |
David Prentice said:
Richard Erlacher said:
Now, that's not quite the case. I've written a few pretty serious app's, a number of simulators and a couple of assemblers, linkers, and loaders, but that was back in the days when Turbo C was new. Prior to that, I used Turbo Pascal, when it was new. I've also written a few pretty neat simulators in Prolog with pieces in 'C'. All that was on the PC, and back in the mid-late '80's. I've only done a little 805x (Maybe 500k lines) programming, in ASM, since most (>90%) of my programming was on other micros, before Windows and much of it before the PC. I have fiddled with the PIC, disliked the AVR from the get-go, and haven't had to program the ARM because I had a software team. My role with ARM stuff has been mostly hardware and as project manager. Is Renesas a microcontroller? I thought it was a software house. I did look at their compiler at one time.
As I suggested earlier, it would be worth your while investigating the modern tool chains. If you have written simulators and assemblers in C, then you will have good experience in those techniques that are useful with microcontrollers. You should be able to pick up quickly with your experience. I freely admit to NO experience with TI, Samsung, Fujitsu ... microcontrollers. However I am aware of their existence. If an 8051 is not ideal, I would make the effort to assess these other families. You can't assume that just because it's ASM, it's messy, nor can you assume that just because it's HLL, it well-structured and well organized.
Yes. I agree with you entirely. You can have good and bad in any language. I've seldom had an 805x app much larger than 5k lines, aside from table space, though some of those have had difficulty fitting in 32kB. Once you've bought the extra code space, you might as well use it.
Classifying an ASM program by the number of source code lines is marginally better than quoting the number of pre-processed HLL lines. So assuming you mean less than 8192 bytes of code space, this implies that you can achieve the price advantage of an 8k to 16k chip. And this size is quite manageable in ASM. Although I would never attempt to port to another cpu. It would be simpler to re-write. This can often reach out, after tables are included, to the 32 kByte boundary. That's where it makes a real difference in cost. That only matters in high-volume cases, however, and most of my work has not recently been high-volume. Most of the 805x stuff has been upgrading code size or performance in systems installed in the '80's by substituting pin-compatible MCU's with better performance or larger on-chip memory. If I had a high-volume app, then 805x would probably not come under consideration. It still, after all, has positive RESET, and positive interrupts. David. Most of what I am involved in is proof-of-concept. Someone needs a concept implemented in some way so that they can gain confidence in its overall functionality. That implicitly requires that the job be completed within a short time. Oddly enough, I've had the best luck doing all the firmware in ASM. This is, admittedly, because it often involves doing things that have been done before, in combination with on-hand, off-the-shelf hardware, appropriately lashed together to configure the system under consideration. The cycle is very brief, and the hardware is not often "new." Tried-and-true seems to work out the best. RE |
