
Greetings,

We are happy to announce the final release of the 68HC11 port of the gnu
gcc compiler version 2.6.3 done by Coactive Aesthetics. This is an
upgrade from the beta release we had done earlier this year.

Major changes in this release are:

	o Changed the machine description files to optimize code
	  generation. I've seen about 30-40% improvement in code size.
	  No analysis has been done for speed, but the numbers should
	  be equivalent.

	o Fixed all known bugs in the compiler.

The compiler still has the following "problems":

	o There is no librarian or support for linking with libraries. I
	  have changed the linker to just ignore the -L and -l flags (if
	  any) that are passed in. In looking at the relocatable file
	  format, it shouldn't be that difficult to add support for
	  libraries.

	o It doesn't handle floating point. Some attempts have been made
	  to gracefully handle the existence of floating point in the C
	  code (i.e. call fatal() indicating the compiler doesn't support
	  floating point).

    	o Currently all longs are still TWO bytes. Since nobody that I
	  have contacted attaches any importance to this, I doubt that it
	  will ever be done.

	o I have not attempted to compile it on a MSDOS system. Given my
	  experience in doing this with the alpha release, I doubt that I
	  ever will try it again. If you have a 386/486 system, you may
	  want to look into installing a free Unix system (Linux or
	  386bsd) to run the cross compiler.

The port was written using the GCB11 Network Microcontroller board that
is manufactured by Coactive Aesthetics. However, there is no assumptions
and/or hardcode values within the compiler which would prevent the
compiler from working on any 68HC11 board. More details on the can be
found in the README file that is part of the distribution.

The source for the 68HC11 specific files and the assembler/linker can be
found at /pub/co/coactive/gcc-6811-release.tar.gz on netcom.com (The ".gz"
suffix indicates that it is in "gzip" format). You should also get the
original distribution for gcc-2.6.3 from your favorite archive site.

Any questions, bug reports, or porting comments/questions should be sent
to gcc@coactive.com.

Thanks,

Otto

--
Otto Lind                  Coactive Aesthetics
otto@coactive.com          P.O. Box 425967, San Francisco, CA 94142
netcom!coactive!otto       voice:(415)626-5152    fax:(415)626-6320
