Hello everyone,

I just got the new IAR upgrade to their Embedded Workbench for the 8051, version 6.10A. I had been waiting for it for some time, as a number of bug fixes and improvements were incorporated. Promised with the new verson were to be significant improvements in code optimizations, and even new C++ support.

It turns out it is a totally new compiler, not merely changes to the old product. The problem is that it is not backward compatible: code written for the previous version will not compile without re-writing.

The CSTARTUP file has completely changed, the calling convention is different, project files are different, bit/pin access is different, even endian-ness has changed. Documentation to assist in making the changes is not yet available. I haven't had time to print out the approximately 350 pages of compiler manual to compare with my old manual, and hard copies of the documentation are not yet available.

There is supposed to be a C-to-C converter to make the changes for you, but for previous IAR code this converter is not yet available. The C-to-C converter for Keil code is available, but I haven't been able to make it work.

I'm in the process of attempting a recompile on a piece of working code, approximately 4KB. It's been an interesting project, letting the compiler find the differences that I need to correct. The code now compiles without error and once IAR gets back to me on the missing library file I'll pass on the results.

If you have this new version I'd be interested in hearing your impressions.

Dennis