VBCC Compiler

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vbcc is a highly optimizing portable and retargetable ISO C compiler. It supports ISO C according to ISO/IEC 9899:1989 and a subset of the new standard ISO/IEC 9899:1999 (C99). It is split into a target-independent and a target-dependent part, and provides complete abstraction of host- and target-arithmetic. Therefore, it fully supports cross-compiling for 8, 16, 32 and 64bit architectures.

Embedded systems are supported by features like different pointer-sizes (e.g. differently sized function- and object-pointers or near- and far-pointers), ROM-able code, inline-assembly, bit-types, interrupt-handlers, section-attributes, stack-calculation and many others (depending on the backend).

vbcc provides a large set of aggressive high-level optimizations as well as target-specific optimizations to produce faster or smaller code. Rather than restricting analysis and optimization to single functions or files, vbcc is able to optimize across functions and even modules. Target-independent optimizations include:

  • cross-module function-inlining
  • partial inlining of recursive functions
  • inter-procedural data-flow analysis
  • inter-procedural register-allocation
  • register-allocation for global variables
  • global common-subexpression-elimination
  • global constant-propagation
  • global copy-propagation
  • dead-code-elimination
  • alias-analysis
  • loop-unrolling
  • induction-variable elimination
  • loop-invariant code-motion
  • loop-reversal