CodeCompressor is fully integrated into RIDE.
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Download CodeCompressor description and preliminary benchmarks as a pdf file (62 Kb)

How does it work ?

CodeCompressor is a complement to traditional optimization tools (that act in the compiler): CodeCompressor acts after the linker, when all the standard optimizations have already been performed.

What does it do ?

CodeCompressor acts in 3 passes, each of which can be automatically or manually controlled.

InLining
In this phase the CodeCompressor will look for functions that are only called once in the application and will move them to the place where they are called, thus saving the CALL and RET instructions.

Factorization
In this phase the CodeCompressor will look everywhere in the binary file for identical blocks of code and will put them in subroutines when they are big enough.

Local Optimizations (Peephole)
In this phase the CodeCompressor will rescan the whole code for the last time looking for local optimizations such as long jumps and calls replacement for the equivalent shorter version where possible.

Benchmarks

The table below shows the code size reduction obtained with CodeCompressor on some typical 8051 demo and test programs. The results without CodeCompressor are obtained with the latest revision of Standard Raisonance Tools. Note that the programs used are quite small and were already very well optimized before CodeCompressor: Raisonance expects typical user applications to be shrunk anywhere between 10% and 20%.

Compatibility