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I'm programming PIC with CCS. It's quite simple and functional. It's libraries are the best. Recently, I look for XC8 compiler, from Microchip. What are the advantages of using XC8 instead CCS?

Gonzalo Cervetti
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  • If you're looking for a compiler that branches unnecessarily and would rather call a 5000 cycle multiply routine over the hardware multiplier, look no further. – Matt Young Jan 04 '16 at 17:37
  • The last time I checked, the migration process was a little rocky. I moved to XC8 for my (tiny) projects because of better tool support -- but as for technical merits: Big ?? – Daniel Jan 04 '16 at 18:09
  • I'm looking but I don't find any advantage for XC8. The free version is not optimized, It has a lot of bugs and doesn't have much libraries. – Gonzalo Cervetti Jan 04 '16 at 18:55

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If you are happy with CCS (or even find it adequate), avoid XC8. I've been using it for years and if I had time and/or used it very often, I'd look for an alternative.

The free version doesn't optimize*, it does not support custom libraries (I was told by Microchip technical support), quite a few annoying bugs (I reported some with no visible effect), ...

The only thing is that it probably has the headers for the new chips soonest, but I'm not even sure about that.

* By looking at generated codes, I saw that its actually worse than that. It does the first phase generation as it would optimize, but then only the optimization itself is disabled. Thus the generated code is sometimes even worse than if it was just brute-force generated.

Szidor
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