John, Thank you for your reply. The MSP430 sounds like a good choice. I have not used GCC tools previously.
>The MSP430 has been very well handled (whereas the group doing the AVR compiler... Well, let's just say they don't seem to be as thorough). The AVR micros was my other choice. I liked the MSP430's better. >Code generation is pretty tight, overall. All the things one can know and love about GCC are supported. >The libraries are very complete, especially in regards to the more commonly used functions (I don't use floating point much, so I can't really comment on them). Math is one area I was interested in since I would hate to implement some math functions in assembly. Since it is GCC based, does that mean that math library functions like sqrt, exp, log, and pow might be supported? My guess is not currently, since I thought I read that floating point was only partially implemented. I guess TI has a floating point assembler library available. >GDB is reported to work, although I'm not much of a GDB user. Source code debugging would be great. I am not familiar with GDB but I hear Visual SlickEdit has can do source level debug doing in the IDE doing command line driven GDB stuff in a hidden console. >We're starting to see JTAG programming support working, which is nice. That would be great. >The C-SPY program that comes with the FET kits basically sucks. It's ideal of error handling is to exit, and about 1 out of every 5 times it gets >synchronization errors. That's good feedback. >The pybsl serial programming software works well, if you're not into JTAG. That sounded interesting as well as the bootloader I saw someplace. >All in all, I'm quite happy with the MSP430 port. Dimitry doesn't even abuse people *too* badly when you report non-existant bugs. And when you >report real ones, a fix is usually less than 24 hours away. That's good. I am usually pretty careful in reporting "bugs" but sometimes I have those "dooh" moments. But then infrequently I think people deserve to get flamed. >For the record, I've used the compiler with the 'F123, the F147, and F149 (which is just a large F147). I wanted to get me an F149. I think 2K RAM is a good as it gets and I will probably use up almost 1K for TCP/IP which kind of worries me only having 1K bytes for a stack. And 60K flash will be a nice luxury as well. Do you have any feelings on stack use and code efficiency? Does 1K sound like I'll be pushing it? Thanks again for your feedback, -Ed
