gnupic: Why I love open source.....
Subject:
Why I love open source.....
From:
Peter Onion ####@####.####
Date:
12 Jul 2005 14:47:35 +0100
Message-Id: <1121176025.9616.46.camel@ratbert.alien.bt.co.uk>
I feel sorry for the people who are stuck with MPLAB/MPLINK etc.
You may have seen a tread on the piclist where I proposed a technique
which relies on the linker putting code into segments in the order
the .o files are given on the linker command line.
I thought it was a reasonable assumption to make and a few tests proved
it to be the observed behaviour. Afterall any other order would seem to
be perverse (except maybe doing it in reverse order).
MPLAB users poo-pooed my idea because "It uses undocumented features of
the linker".....
So I looked at the gplink sources....... I'm still happily using my
technique because I know what gplink is doing, and if that behaviour
changes, I'll still know what it is doing so I can adapt my techique.
MPLAB users arn't so lucky !
This is one of the reasons I ditched all M$ products years ago. The
little bit of Windows programming I did do (back in the days of Windows
3.1 ) always seemed to run up against bugs/quirks or undocumented
behaviour in the M$ APIs and libraries. With out the source I quickly
became frustrated.
BTW the technique means I can include drivers for various devices (like
UART,TMRx,LCDdisplays) by simply including the appropriate ".o" file in
the liker command and adding EXTERN declarations for the device API.
The overhead is a small ISR and a bit of generic startup code. No need
to worry about the device initialisation or interrupt handlers as they
all get included and called automagically.
Peter
