Having speed issue with SDCC

newcoleco · July 17, 2011

I've seen that PkK was very active lately regarding the Z80 portion of SDCC. So, I've tried the new improved versions of SDCC, and I do have some issues. I don't know if anybody tried or noticed them.

First - While linking with CC2, you get "can't find LNK file". This is not a problem, CCI2 just wanted to delete this file to clean up a little bit the folder. The reason why CCI2 can't find any .LNK file is because SDCC renamed this file as .LK ... but it's no big deal, you can delete it yourself and ignore the warning/error.

Second - Compiling is slower, for some parts at least. One C file I've compiled yesterday during the ADAMCon took about 5 minutes to compile, compared to a few seconds with an older version of SDCC. I think the issue regards complex IF statements and structs.

The following zip file contains 2 ROM files, both made with the exact same source code. One was compiled with a 2010 SDCC version and the other one with the most reccent SDCC version. Compiling with the new SDCC version gives a slightly bigger ROM size for an unknow reason. Note : This game/demo project was proposed by Dale Wick during the ADAMCon to talk about various jumping mechanics we can use in videogames.

gunnar.zip

I can't post the SDCC setup files I've used to make these tests, but I can name them :

sdcc-20100614-5852-setup.exe and sdcc-20110716-6642-setup.exe

You can also try comparing the stable 3.0 version released in 2010 and the actual 3.0.4 version in the snapshot Windows section by yourself ... you should notice a speed difference, and also notice a file size difference but in the other way than described here because between the stable version and the last days of 2010 there was some important improvements made to reduce the ROM file size. Again, it also depends on what is in the code you compile.

Edited July 17, 2011 by newcoleco