Ooooooh! You should've come up with this first!
Well, this now opens the question of interplatform compatibility of C... But as I don't C I don't want to comment on it - you probably know that far better.

I partially agree with Andy - it would be probably better to have only a small debugging core inside the controller (even if I don't think it is a good idea to leave it in the final product - but this may depend on the application itself and change from case to case). Even if you claim you usually have enough resources, it is always good to cut the requirements down and an another point of Andy is still valid - it is good to push the requirements upwards. Even if you don't trust Win-based tools and you want to have full control over your tools (and want to use the serial terminal approach), you can still use an intermediate "translator" which would replace the Win-tool for the user interface.

You might also have a look at http://www.noicedebugger.com/, which already supports some of your targets (8051 and ) and the author is obviously willing to cooperate on modifying his tool and porting it to different platforms. The interface (protocol) it is using is published, so you can use the approach I described above, while having a tested core and also having the opportunity to use the win-GUI.

Jan Waclawek


PS. As per line-by-line assembly, I remember on ZX-Spectrum I had several very nice monitors (one of them residing in the video-RAM...) and when I had the urge to write quickly a few lines of asm code, I really used a table-driven assembler: the "table" was on a piece of paper and the "assembler" was me... :-)