I was working on 8051 today.

It’s still alive and kicking.

How does it compare to 6502, 6508, 68000 and Z80?

Is it easy to use? Or advanced-ish? For hobbysts

If you work in C and are happy with the standard libraries and don't want to go too deep into the hardware then most of the 8-bit micros are pretty similar. During COVID and the component shortages I had to do a bit of swapping around, luckily it was all GPIO, I2C and UART stuff so nothing too taxing.

Or like it's 2025. Plenty of current-production parts using an 8051 core as either their main sequencer, or as a low power core with bigger options on the main power rail.

8051 is cool, but no one is going to be writing their own homebrew assembler for them, there are plenty of FOSS ones.

And even assembly itself is going away, sdcc is a perfectly good compiler which is sufficient for a lot of 8051 applications.

Why not? I wrote a 6502 assembler a few months ago - despite being born decades too late It's fun

It can be hidden away in SoC IP blocks, like DisplayPort blocks, too.

8051 rapidly being replaced by RISC-V now.

Can you give an example? I see RISC-V being used to replace custom 16 and 32 bit cores, and M0-class ARM cores, in the 10k+ gate range, but haven't really seen a migration in the 8 bit space.

I have personally ported a usb c usbpd stack from 8051 to cortex m0 to rv32ec. I can’t talk for gate count, it for code size the biggest factor was the compiler, with ARMCC giving the smallest code. As the rom was larger than the core, that was a bigger factor in gate count.

rv32ec is indeed less dense than thumb2.

This is of course not the case anymore with the newer bitmanip and code size extensions, but it holds true for the older, crude rv32ec.

A shameless trip down memory lane after re-discovering my first Turbo Pascal program

Nothing 1984 about it.

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