30th Anniversary: Pictures
Byte Craft Limited has been involved in many projects you've heard of, and many you haven't. We've posted some pictures from the "Historical Products Department".
Celebrating 30 Years
22 May 2009, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada -- Byte Craft Limited is celebrating thirty years in the embedded systems industry.
eTPU_C Product News
eTPU | eTPU_CeTPU_C Compiler Update V1.0.7.78
The eTPU C compiler V1.0.7.78 has been released and is available from the customer update depot on Byte Craft's website.
Checking eTPU_C generated code
Submitted by Walter Banks on Wed, 2010-01-27 22:47. assembly | eTPU | eTPU_CTools in your eTPU toolchain may support you by disassembling eTPU_C-generated code. If they report instructions different than eTPU_C's listing file shows, you may be inclined to verify eTPU_C's output by hand.
eTPU machine code is very complex compared to traditional machine language. As a result, we receive support questions from people who have encountered subinstructions they didn't expect.
Parallelism
Submitted by Walter Banks on Fri, 2009-10-09 20:54. C | IEC 61131
In the comp.arch newsgroup, we've been following a heated discussion about Parallelism. It's focused on the question of designing software to run on multiple cores, either with shared memory or message passing.
We're of the opinion that the compiler can assist the developer in this task. After all, the compiler knows what is (or could be) in memory at any one moment.
Byte Craft Limited Introduction: simplified Chinese
Byte Craft Limited and our distributor Qast Software Group have produced an introduction to Byte Craft Limited and our products in simplified Chinese.
printf for embedded
Submitted by Kirk Zurell on Thu, 2009-09-24 20:25. C | debuggingThere's only so much debugging information an LED or LCD display can report. What's worse, embedding debugging code in the executable can provoke misuse, while stripping it out can cause heisenbugs.
Your C compiler can help manage debugging information for you in a way that doesn't interfere with your product. Here's how:
The stack controversy
Submitted by Walter Banks on Thu, 2009-09-17 14:44. C | compiler
Just when you think an old misconception is dead...
The "stack/no stack" discussion has arisen again. We've heard renewed
claims that C programs require a hardware stack, and that a software
stack is unacceptably slow. Both ideas are patently false.
Alternative opcodes
Submitted by Walter Banks on Tue, 2009-05-05 21:05. opcodes | optimizationA support question brought up an interesting optimization topic: alternative opcodes.
We've all heard stories of using undocumented or unofficial opcodes to squeeze out a few cycles' extra performance. It's much easier, not to mention safer, to work within the published instruction set but to approach it in novel ways.
Here's an example:
A perfectly useful do-nothing statement
Submitted by Walter Banks on Tue, 2009-03-24 14:50. CC macros are very useful, but a little taxing for both compiler writers and programmers.
eTPU_C:
C6808: