vbcc is a highly optimizing portable and retargetable ISO C compiler. It supports ISO C according to ISO/IEC 9899:1989 and a subset of the new standard ISO/IEC 9899:1999 (C99). It is split into a target-independent and a target-dependent part, and provides complete abstraction of host- and target-arithmetic. Therefore, it fully supports cross-compiling for 8, 16, 32 and 64bit architectures.

Embedded systems are supported by features like different pointer-sizes (e.g. differently sized function- and object-pointers or near- and far-pointers), ROM-able code, inline-assembly, bit-types, interrupt-handlers, section-attributes, stack-calculation and many others (depending on the backend).

vbcc provides a large set of aggressive high-level optimizations as well as target-specific optimizations to produce faster or smaller code. Rather than restricting analysis and optimization to single functions or files, vbcc is able to optimize across functions and even modules. Target-independent optimizations include:

• cross-module function-inlining
• partial inlining of recursive functions
• inter-procedural data-flow analysis
• inter-procedural register-allocation
• register-allocation for global variables
• global common-subexpression-elimination
• global constant-propagation
• global copy-propagation
• dead-code-elimination
• alias-analysis
• loop-unrolling
• induction-variable elimination
• loop-invariant code-motion
• loop-reversal