Programming 32-bit Microcontrollers in C

Day 4 NUMB3RS

The Plan

Just yesterday we learned about different types of C variables, and we stressed the importance of using the right type of variable for each application to preserve a precious resource: RAM. I don’t know about you, but I am now very curious about putting those variables to work and seeing how the MPLAB^© C32 compiler performs basic arithmetic on them. Knowing that the PIC32 has a set of 32 “working” registers and a 32-bit ALU, I am expecting to see some very efficient code, but I also want to compare the relative performance of the same operation performed on different data types and, in particular, floating-point types. Hopefully after today we will have a better understanding of how to balance performance and memory resources, ...