Introduction to microcontrollers - Part 2

Although architecture independence and portability is very desirable, microcontroller program cannot be totally detached from specific characteristics of the underlying hardware. Programming a microcontroller, even in a high level language, requires accessibility to various peripheral registers, ability to fix placement of both program and data, and exact knowledge of memory types and organization, stack usage and interrupt handling. The trend towards adoption of high-level languages has had an effect on both development tools suppliers and silicon suppliers. Historically, compilers have never been outstandingly efficient with respect to their 'code bloat' ratio. This article discusses briefly some of the improvements which have been accomplished in most compilers.