Hacker News Reader

It has a few compiler extensions that are very useful for small embedded development, but GCC won't add (eg an "at" keyword to let you place a symbol at a specific address).

As for "why" nobody has done it, it's probably just because nobody has. The targets are mostly 8-bit devices with limited resources and SDCC is good enough. Typically the vendors have their own paid toolchains. I don't really know how well GCC would perform on those targets (although AVR8 uses GCC).

Yeah, I can get that. When I was working with SDCC, I really would have preferred GCC or clang - SDCC has some funky quirks that really pissed me off and introduced some weird bugs.

And yeah, AVR8 (and IIRC 16 and 32) have GCC toolchains as well as avr-llvm, which is pretty sweet.

>AVR8 (and IIRC 16 and 32)

What's AVR16, may I ask?

SDCC supports architectures that GCC doesn't support. 8051 is one of these. I'm not sure if GCC supports any 8-bit CPUs.

sdcc is the only(viable?) foss option for many 8-bit/older architectures. 8051, z80, stm8 are what I've used it for. A lot of newer chips(example many of TI cc2xxx SoCs) actually have 8051 still, stm8 is newer entry(I think).