Fearsome
Newbie level 6
I know this topic has been debated many times before but when people are asked which compiler they prefer, they usually answer without any motivation. I'm a hobbyist and will not spend money on a compiler. Thus I'm only interested in hearing comparisons of the FREE versions of compilers for PICs in the 18F-family. I've used Hi-Tec for 16F PICs but when I tried this compiler in the free version for 18F you get some disturbing messages. Namely, that the code will run 4 times slower than without the optimizations and that the code will occupy more ROM. The increase in code size I can handle but the slow-down means that some library routines won't work (I think at least), e.g., delay and UART. So I began looking at the academic version of C18 from Microchip. So my question is if anybode has compared the FREE versions of C18 and Hi-Tec's PICC18? Is it worth building custom routines to compensate for the non-optimized Hi-Tec code?