Tag Archives: code size

Code Size changes with “int” on 8bit and 32bit platforms

I was looking for a few bytes extra flash today, and realized that some old AVR code I had, which used uint8_t extensively for loop counters and indexes (dealing with small arrays) might not be all that efficient on the STM32 Cortex-M3.

So, I went over the code and replaced all places where the size of the counter wasn’t really actually important, and made some comparisons. I was compiling the exact same c file in both cases, with only a type def changing between runs.

Compiler versions and flags

platform gcc version cflags
AVR avr-gcc (GCC) 4.3.5 -DNDEBUG -Wall -Os -g -ffunction-sections -fdata-sections -Wstrict-prototypes -mmcu=atmega168 -funsigned-char -funsigned-bitfields -fpack-struct -fshort-enums
STM32 arm-none-eabi-gcc (GNU Tools for ARM Embedded Processors) 4.6.2 20120316 (release) [ARM/embedded-4_6-branch revision 185452] -DNDEBUG -Wall -Os -g -ffunction-sections -fdata-sections -Wstrict-prototypes -fno-common -mcpu=cortex-m3 -mthumb

And… here’s the results

counter type avr-size arm-none-eabi-size
unsigned int 1318 844
uint8_t (original) 1160 856
uint_least8_t 1160 856
uint_fast8_t 1160 844
int 1330 820
int8_t 1212 872
int_least8_t 1212 872
int_fast8_t 1212 820

I would personally say that it looks like ARM still has some work to go on optimizations. If _least8 and _fast8 take up more space than int it’s not really as polished as the avr-gcc code yet. For me personally, as this code no longer has to run on both AVR and STM32, I’ll just use int.

So, after extending this a bit, my original conclusion about the fast_ types not being fully optimized with arm-gcc were wrong. It’s more that, on AVR, your “don’t care” counters should be unsigned for smaller size, while on STM32, they should be signed (Though I still think it’s dodgy that int_least8_t resulted in bigger code than int_fast8_t) Also, even if signed is better in the best case, the wrong signed is also the worst case. Awesome.