[sdcc-devel] SDCC got funding

[Philipp K. K. <pk...@sp...>]

SDCC is primarily developed by unpaid volunteer work; though once in a 
while there was some outside support, in particular by university 
employees being allowed to work on SDCC a bit during paid time, and SDCC 
developers receiving hardware samples from microcontroller vendors.
However, sometimes the limitations of this are felt. In particular when 
I've had a few free hours to work on SDCC, started working on a feature 
or bug, but was not able to finish the work during the time I had, or 
simply was not able to even fully track down the cause of the bug. And 
when it took a long time until I could work again on that feature or 
bug, it took extra time or effort to get into it again. Sometimes I 
would instead start work on another aspect of SDCC instead. Having 
funding available for working on SDCC is IMO really helpful in these 
situations - instead of having to stop work on SDCC to go back to other 
paid work, I can just keep working on the feature or bug, since this 
then is paid work.
SDCC developers have been applying for funding for SDCC projects, and we 
are happy to announce that two important such applications succeeded 
recently.

The NGI0 Commons Fund (https://nlnet.nl/commonsfund/) donates to improve 
SDCC support for various target hardware, as well as implement 
machine-independent improvements to make SDCC more competitive vs. 
non-free compilers 
(https://sourceforge.net/p/sdcc/wiki/NGI0-Commons-SDCC/). 
Hardware-specific improvements planned include improving support for 
Padauk's popular low-cost microcontrollers, improving support for the 
Rabbit microcontrollers common in older IoT devices, and improving 
support for Toshiba TLCS microcontrollers. The focus for 
machine-independent improvements will be in enhancing support for recent 
ISO C standards, an optimization to reduce memory usage for local 
variables, and implementing a link-time optimization to optimize out 
unused functions and objects. The latter is the one feature 
most-requested by SDCC users in recent years. This project in done 
jointly by five SDCC developers.

The Sovereign Tech Fund (https://www.sovereign.tech/programs/fund) 
comissioned work on improving SDCC for safety and security of embedded 
firmware (https://sourceforge.net/p/sdcc/wiki/STF-SDCC). We will improve 
support for aspects of modern C standards and dialects relevant to 
safety and security, get SDCC ready for post-quantum cryptography, work 
on mitigations for potential side-channel attacks and improve the 
reliability of SDCC via extended testing also covering less-commonly 
used command-line parameter combinations. This project is done by one 
SDCC developer.

We can imagine all this coming together e.g. when writing firmware for 
an IoT device based on an eZ80 or Rabbit 4000 SoC. The SDCC user writing 
this firmware will benefit from the improved support for the target 
architecture, modern C features for efficiency and convenience, general 
high level optimizations (all part of the NGI0 Commons project), modern 
C features relevant for safety and security, to help avoid bugs in the 
user-written code, efficient side-channel-free code generated for modern 
cryptography algorithms (all part of the STF project). And thanks to 
improved testing and fixed compiler bugs, the firmware will compile and 
work very reliably (depending on the details part of the STF or the NGI0 
project).

Philipp

P.S.: I'd like to reuse this text for
* A post on sdcc-user
* An announcement in the news section on our website. For 18 years, that 
section was used to announce release candidates and releases only, but 
we used to have other news, too.