Interesting points.

I'm almost 100% assembly language but that is due to the type of designs I do. We compute and process things unheard of on a 8051 running at 12Mhz. My product senses and computes three dimensional force vectors in multiple byte precision over 100 times a second.

That was the fun part.

Then I have to add a user interface for various market niches. That is where a C program portion would come in handy.

I look at C portions different than most. When I design a system, I want absolute control over the systems firmware engine so I use assembly there. This allows me to create a firmware "engine" that will run at the core of various products in different market niches with little alteration.

When I get to a user interface where customers will want modifications, I switch to C programming. That significantly eases our customer flexibility.

COMPILER / ASSEMBLER
====================
Actually, we looked at Tasking and Keil IDEs but we still use a free assembler that was published in the early 1980s. heheeheh. We just modify a equate file and support all the latest versions.

For an IDE, we just use our Borland C IDE with settings and highlights for the 8051.

To assemble, I merely click on a MSDOS icon and it generates a listing and hex file. I can view the listing for errors and I can slam the hex file directly into my lab prototype's flash version micro.

We don't use emulators much either. My boards are all small SMT designs and its just a lot of hassle to get to them. We can throw together an assembly language test routine in minutes and surprisingly enough this works very well.

I designed my own Flash In-System Programmer card an so we just have it plugged into the lab prototype and connect the extra DB-9 cable to the PC's COM port. Its a great, fast system.

Its probably doubtful to hear, but I prefer this way of working to any other emulator/compiler system I've worked with in over 20 years of firmware work.

I can assemble and execute new code in the target before I could reach he coffee machine. 8-)

-Jay C. Box