SDCC

The Small Device C Compiler is the free (apart from GCC having an AVR port) compiler for 8-bit microcontrollers (µC). It is competing with various non-free compilers. 8-bit µC are common in peripheral devices of larger systems, SDCC is an essential part of the free software ecosystem, in particular for developing firmware. We aim to both improve SDCC support for various target hardware, as well as implement machine-independent improvements to make SDCC more competitive vs. non-free compilers. Hardware-specific improvements planned include improving support for Padauk's popular low-cost microcontrollers, improving support for the Rabbit microcontrollers common in older IoT devices, improving code generation for the f8 port, and improving support for Toshiba TLCS microcontrollers. The focus for machine-independent improvements will be in enhancing support for recent ISO C standards, an optimization to reduce memory usage for local variables, and implementing a link-time optimization to optimize out unused functions and objects. The latter is the one feature most-requested by SDCC users in recent years.