[Coco] gcc6809 details

[James Dessart]

On Tue, 30 Dec 2003, Roger Taylor wrote:

 > James, where is the actual compiler?  I would love to add C support to
 > Portal-9 by being able to call on your compiler.

At the moment, it has to be built from source.  And, for bandwidth
reasons, not all that source is on my server.

 From what I've heard, there has been some success building it on 
Windows.
Once the binaries are built, they should work on any Windows system with
the proper libraries, etc.  I don't have a Windows machine, so I can't
build or test the compiler.

At some point, I think it'd be a good idea to make a source 
distribution,
which contains everything the user needs.  Trim off the excess from the
gcc distribution, put it all together with a Makefile, and make sure the
user doesn't get afflicted with error messages (of which there are many
right now).

 > My other question is: is the source code EDTASM-compatible?  What
 > assembler is required to complete the job?

I don't believe it's EDTASM compatible.  Also available on the 
sourceforge
site is the as09 assembler, which takes care of the assembly coming from
gcc.  I would imagine that a simple text filter could convert as09
assembly to EDTASM compatible assembly.  As it stands, when the compiler
is built properly the user never even has to worry about the assembler,
unless they want to.

What's been discussed here, and I think is a good idea, is to have a
page reserved for direct-page access, in order to add some "registers" 
to
gcc.  I believe it's needed for floating point support, as well as some
code I'm working with right now.  Unfortunately, I don't understand gcc
internals well enough to implement that.  The 68hc11 supports use of 
page0
for this purpose, but using DP gives us a bit more flexibility.  The
68hc11 code looks like a good place to start.

I'm considering that a number 1 priority for the project.  I don't 
really think providing an attribute or pragma for direct-page as a good 
use of it, as it can be used to registers which gcc allocates 
automatically.  This is much more useful.

James