SDCC function _sdcc_external_startup will be changing to __sdcc_external_startup about free-pdk-examples HOT 4 OPEN

Yes, I noticed that a few weeks ago.
It caused some really annoying bugs that were hard to track down as well.
Because we usually setup and calibrate the clock in this function, it means that pretty much every program written for these Padauk MCUs will probably have to be updated, or they will (silently) fail to operate properly.

For now, I've been using this in some of my projects:

#if __SDCC_REVISION >= 13762
unsigned char __sdcc_external_startup(void) {
#else
unsigned char _sdcc_external_startup(void) {
#endif
...
}

But that is pretty ugly.

Maybe @spth has some ideas for a better way to handle this (ideally some kind of backward compatibility inside SDCC itself?

I suppose worst case we could to a conditional define in one of the common header files to implement backwards compatibility with a compiler warning maybe.

Something like this (in one of the include files) would probably work:

#if __SDCC_REVISION >= 13762
  #define _sdcc_external_startup __sdcc_external_startup
  #warning "Update to the newer __sdcc_external_startup syntax!"
#endif

But, that won't help someone that just updates SDCC without pulling in new include files.

from free-pdk-examples.

ideally some kind of backward compatibility inside SDCC itself?

I would predict that it's unlikely.

Unfortunately for the PDK platform, the init code is generated by the compiler, rather than like on some other platforms where it is a separate, override-able, crt0 library that's linked in, so defines are probably going to be the only option.

Your solution involving the include file warning sounds good to me. Maybe reverse it so that it warns to update the version of SDCC.

BTW, I was motivated to file this issue because I have been referring to the FreePDK website documentation while putting together a patch to unify __sdcc_external_startup behaviour across platforms. Did you know that no platform other than MCS51 actually acted on the return value from __sdcc_external_startup? If my patch is accepted, the PDK platform will also respect the return value and skip GSINIT code if required.

from free-pdk-examples.

Looks like a 'fix' for SDCC feature request #868 has been implemented with commit r13850.

from free-pdk-examples.