[Fwd: Re: [avr-libc-dev] Newlib [was: Re: Release?]]

[E. Weddington]

Marek said I can forward to the list, since he accidentally forgot.
This should help clear up the history a bit.

Eric

-------- Original Message --------
Subject:        Re: [avr-libc-dev] Newlib [was: Re: Release?]
Date:   Tue, 14 Dec 2004 20:48:10 +0100
From:   Marek Michalkiewicz <address@hidden>
To:     E. Weddington <address@hidden>
References: 	<address@hidden> 
<address@hidden>



On Tue, Dec 14, 2004 at 10:54:42AM -0700, E. Weddington wrote:

> I don't know all the history. Marek knows it though.
>
> IIRC, it started originally in newlib. I'm not completely sure of the 
> reason why avr-libc was broken off. But there are some advantages to 
> having a C lib seperate from newlib, in that we can put in AVR specific 
> headers and code, such as the bootloader, etc. I would certainly welcome 
> more comments from others in this area.

Here is some background: avr-libc and newlib are completely independent
projects (avr-libc was started by Denis - it didn't start in newlib).
The newlib avr target support (done when avr-libc already existed) was
more a proof of concept, and served as a testsuite - some code in there
caused early avr-gcc to crash, a few bugs were found and fixed :)

AVR-specific optimized code could be put into libgloss (this is the
hardware-specific part of newlib, which can be built for many embedded
CPUs - AVR would be another one), while newlib remains a fairly complete
(but not as optimized as avr-libc), portable C library.  I had plans
for this (looking a bit into RTEMS, too), but never got around to it.

Marek