Porting C to the MCU (commonly known as microcontroller) 8051 began in the late 1980s. Objectively speaking, there are many challenges in porting C to the 8051 MCU. For example: · The 8051’s non-Von Neumann architecture (separate program and data memory spaces), along with additional bit-addressable memory space on the chip; · The on-chip data and program memory space is too small, and there is a possibility of expanding them externally; · The on-chip integrated peripherals are register-mapped (i.e., SFR), rather than using the conventional I/O address space; · There are many derivative types of the 8051 chip (over a hundred), and C language must be able to operate on each of their hardware resources without exception. These are challenges that C language based on MPU did not face in the past. After the tireless efforts of companies like Keil/Franklin, Archmeades, IAR, BSO/Tasking, it began to mature in the 1990s, becoming a specialized high-level language for MCUs. The long-standing issue of “high-level languages generating excessively long code and running too slowly, thus being unsuitable for microcontrollers” has been largely overcome. Currently, the code length of C language on the 8051 has reached 1.2 to 1.5 times that of assembly language. At sizes over 4K bytes, the advantages of C language can be further realized. As for execution speed, with the help of good simulators, identifying critical code and further optimizing it manually can easily achieve satisfactory results. When it comes to development speed, software quality, structural rigor, and program robustness, the perfection of C language is incomparable to assembly language programming. Today, it is indeed time for MCU developers to wield the powerful tool of C language. Below, we will introduce the advantages of C language for microcontrollers using the 8051 as an example: · You can write perfect microcontroller programs without understanding the instruction set of the microcontroller; · You can write professionally-level programs that conform to hardware realities without needing to understand the specific hardware of the microcontroller; · Different function data can overlap, effectively utilizing the limited RAM space on the chip; · Programs have robustness: data corruption is a major cause of abnormal program operation. C language provides many professional treatments for data, avoiding asynchronous corruption during operation; · C language offers complex data types (arrays, structures, unions, enumerations, pointers, etc.), greatly enhancing program processing capability and flexibility; · It provides storage types such as auto, static, const, and specialized storage types for the 8051 microcontroller like data, idata, pdata, xdata, code, automatically allocating addresses for variables; · It offers compilation modes such as small, compact, and large to accommodate the size of on-chip memory; · The protection and restoration of the interrupt service program context, as well as the filling of the interrupt vector table, are directly related to the microcontroller and are handled by the C compiler;
· It provides commonly used standard function libraries for users to use directly;
· Macros defined in header files, complex data types, and function prototypes facilitate program portability and support the development of serialized products for microcontrollers; · There is strict syntax checking, resulting in few errors that can be quickly eliminated at a high-level language level;
· It can conveniently accept services from various utility programs: for example, on-chip resource initialization can be automatically generated by specialized utility programs; also, there are real-time multitasking operating systems that can schedule multiple tasks, simplifying user programming and improving operational safety, etc.
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