I have fond memories of using it for PIC16 as a teenager, ~25 years ago. It was a huge step up from writing assembly. My parents bought me a Microchip PICSTART Plus, but refused to pay for a Hitech-C compiler license. :)

The PIC compiler options were never standards compliant up until around when Microchip purchased AVR. There are great chips now that have free gcc support, reasonable power draw, and 32bit float support (ATSAM3X8E current prices are not worth it in many cases.)PIC does still have a few key use-cases, but most people will hit the stack depth limits pretty quickly in C. A pic12 Assembly project is fun, but the limitations cut deep these days.STM32&#x2F;ESP32&#x2F;RP2350 or nRF for low power stuff are far less effort these days, and give much better value. =3

If it has not to be SDCC, Mikroe compilers have support for them across C, BASIC and Pascal compilers, if I am not mistaken.

SDCC has been a nice resource for a variety of MCUs. I wish it had support for some of the 8-bit PIC chips like the PIC10 and PIC12... maybe one day!

I used sdcc for an 8051 based commercial project a while back. I seem to remember spending more time reading the assembly to figure out workarounds for the compiler than actually writing C code!Whereas sdcc works brilliantly for z80 lineage processors. I wrote quite a lot of C for Gameboy recently and didn&#x27;t find a single compiler bug in sdcc which revised my opinion of it upwards greatly.

when you have large code, bugs will find you. for example two uint16 vars globally declared one after another. adding them together to each other will produce an access to garbage memory after 5-6 additions. dumb code but a simple repro. i ran into its bug when working on eInk price tags a while back.

I used it for some toy projects never ran into &quot;bugs&quot; as in this is just broken, but it&#x27;s quirky for sure.

I assume you&#x27;re running that test suite using a 3rd party 8051 emulator to avoid the potential for common-mode errors in both your compiler and emulator resulting in false confidence the compiler&#x27;s correctness?&gt; two simulators used for testing, sim51 (a plain 8051) and minitel_simNarrator: No, he was not.

What a coincidence, just yesterday I asked an LLM to generate a C compiler for the 8051 because SDCC&#x27;s output was not optimized.
Within an 1.5 hour it was correctly compiling my project at 60% of the size of what SDCC generates.
One or 2 quota refreshes later it passed the SDCC test suite and optimized soft floats.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;jyaif&#x2F;cc51" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;jyaif&#x2F;cc51</a>

SDCC has the best OSS 8051 compiler. It is buggy as hell, but it is free. Sometimes that is good enough.

Has worked well enough for me on 8051 and stm8

TIL about Dallas Semiconductor from this page.Love Silicon Prairie lore.

SDCC – Small Device C Compiler