Just in time to greet 2017 properly, we are releasing new versions of the toolchains for two of the most popular Renesas targets: the RX and RL78 families.

The release notes for each of these platforms may be found below, covering what changes each of these new releases bring:

• GCC for Renesas 4.9.2.201604-GNURL78 (Windows | Linux)
  1. (Improvement) In this release we are using new, significantly optimized libraries.
  2. (Bug Fix) LTO algorithm removes HardwareVectors in some cases, even though KEEP is used in the linker script. This issue has been fixed.
  3. (Improvement) We added multiple new RTL patterns (in the RTL/code generator part of the compiler) aimed to reduce the code size and/or improve the speed of the RL78 executables. These include bitfield manipulation, builtin memory/string operation, bit rotations and integer multiplications.
  4. (Bug Fix) The “usum_wideqihi3” pattern caused compiler errors when using –Os. This issue has been fixed.
  5. (Improvement) Replaced the ‘skz/br’ pair with ‘bnz’, when possible, to reduce the code size, this way saving up 4 bytes for each replaced pair.

• GCC for Renesas 4.8.4.201604-GNURX (Windows | Linux)
  1. (Bug Fix) GNURX generates link errors in some cases when relaxation is enabled -mrelax is used. This issue has been fixed.
  2. (Improvement) In this release we are using new, optimized, libraries.
  3. (Bug Fix) LTO algorithm removes HardwareVectors in some cases, even though KEEP is used in the linker script. This issue has been fixed.

In addition to the changes above, the Linux installer for both toolchains now offers command-line flags to automate execution as much as possible, as well as the ability to also act as an uninstaller for the toolchains. With this update, the installer can both install and uninstall the toolchain from one or more paths from your Linux distribution.

Finally, the release notes for both toolchains also include a list of the currently known issues, which will be resolved in the coming updates.

We greatly value your feedback, so please let us know if you have any questions or comments.

On behalf of the entire team at CyberThor Studios Ltd.,
We wish you all a Happy New Year!