Swordfish Basic Compiler for PIC vs Other basic comp?

[bluex]

Hi,
I have found on this forum a post mentioning SWordFish Basic compiler, http://www.mecanique.co.uk/products/swordfish/index.html and I'm interrested in buying it. Has anyone tested full version ? how does it compare to PBP or MikroE Basic ?
When I say compare I do NOT mean the structure of code (modules, procedures, user types ....), I mean:
- generated code quality (size)?
- stability of the compiler ?
- Libraries ?

Best regards
BlueX

[bluex]

No body compared them. It seems that sfCompiler is not so interresting or less than mikroe mikrobasic as I see 

[meax98]

It would be better to ask is there something that you can't do with mikroe basic?

[bluex]

The problem with MikroE basic is that it's very very buggy ...   All their compilers are buggy ... lot of bugs .. either basic, pascal or C. instead of doing ONLY one compiler and to do it correctly, (like Hitec do with C only) they try to do every kind of compiler for every kind of mcu. This is the problem with mikroE.
I uses PBP lot of time before for the company I was working for, and I can confirm that until now, we have discovered only one bug that MeLabs corrected in less that a week.
I tried MikroPascal only one afternoon, and I discovered more than 8 bugs ... very ugly bugs ... their pascal compiler had bugs in very rudimentary things like adding a char to a string ... does not work, calling Delay inserts all the code of Delay function every where you called it, ... casting variables ... worked with no-logic behind ... string manipulation, incorrectely handled if your string contains control caracters ...
Very ugly compilers ... do not ever compare MikroE product with meLabs or Hitec products ... nothing to compare.

PS. I do not work for meLabs neither am I a meLabs resseler ... I'm only a long time mcu developper and I have enough experience in industrual and automation developments ...

Best regards

[meax98]

I'm not using pascal compiler, but mikrobasic is more stable and better with each release. And they correct bugs in real-time. How many years is melabs or hitec on the market? I still remember their beginnings! Every beginning is hard, but I'll give them my support, because, how many years we were asking melabs to implement "new" features like 32-bit math, support for GLCD's ... They have "hard" ears!

[bluex]

I agree with you meax98, PBP is becomming somewhat old compared to MikroE compilers, but if adding more features makes the compiler ugly and unstable, I think that the best is that they keep it as it is. Perhaps they are preparing another compiler (like SwordFish basic) but I think that adding Floating points for examples imply redesign of 80% of the compiler. In fact, if you have analysed the libraries of PBP, you can have see that these are fully written as MPASM Macros. All macros are written with Integer variables in mind, and that work very fine. if you want to add Floating points, when you mix floats with integers you have to do type promotions, on the fly conversion,  type casting, ... and this is not as easy at it appear if the compiler was not written from the ground up to do that. So I think that adding Floating implies 80% of rewrite of macros. And Rewriting a stable and working code is not an easy decision when your product is massively commercialised.
What i hope is that mikroE stops adding functionnalities and take more time to stabilise their compilers.

Best regards

[onr]

thank you for help