Wow this is actually more than just a C compiler... it supports numerous 6502 systems like NES, has a number of useful libraries and examples like disk i/o and many ample programs including sprite multiplexing. There are also extensive pragmas to help optimize.
Neat. When I owned 8-bit machines back in the 1980's, I never bothered to learn assembly; just BASIC. I'd love to tinker with retro computers again including things like the Commander X16, but to be honest I'm too old and impatient to code in assembly even though I'm comfy with it now. If I could use a C compiler that inflicted a non-heinous size/performance penalty, I'd be happy. Especially if I could link in asm libs for performance-critical or low-level functions.
That's awesome. 40 years ago people would have killed for such (I myself included, if it were for Z80 instead of 6502).<p>But why? I know better then to ask for such projects, but here I do, because the project's readme provides a 'history & motivation' section, albeit which doesn't really tells much of the latter.<p>"The original idea for the oscar64 compiler was to translate the C source to an intermediate 16 bit byte code". That's (afair) the approach taken by the (out-of-tree) GCC port to the Parallax P8X32A (itself not an easy target for C: registers, if one wants to call the local memory location used as such that are wide, but the architecture is memory starved and there's no hardware stack). Is there some overlap?
> After extensive optimizations it turns out, that the interpreted code is not significantly smaller than the native code in most scenarios (although there are cases where the difference is significant).<p>Does that mean that the whole thing was ultimately a failed experiment, or that the native code optimizations have become so good that the interpreted mode is made obsolete in most situations?
So I recently took at broad look at some of the old C compilers and wrote an article about it. One interesting thing of note is a lot of compilers in the mid 70s compilers like the Small-C compiler actually only compiled a subset of the C programming language. This was because the 8-bit systems were much more resource constrained the then PDP-11s that C was developed on, and C was difficult to compile. It's hard to believe computers once struggled to run C code, and that definitely contributes to why you see more Pascal, Assembly, and Basic during that time period
Cool stuff, seems to be competing with cc65 (not very performant, includes a stdlib), sdcc (very new port), vbcc (not open-source, best performance), and kickc (not standard c)