I disagree. The 816 is relatively suitable for C, its stack modes in particular are useful for that; not as well as m68k, but far from unusable. I have several titles shipped in C for the NES, and Little Medusa for SNES, and given it's not unusably slow for NES, how could it be for the 1.5-2x faster SNES?byuu wrote:There's been a persistent barrier in that even the best, structured 65816 code is basically a write-only language (I've had to abandon several fan translations due to code rot.) And the CPU is just too slow and too limited (*one* accumulator, *two* index registers, awkward 8/16-bit toggling) to pull off a higher level language.Overall it does seem like the development scene is pretty slow even compared with the NES and Mega Drive, never mind the C64...
What has made the Mega Drive a breakout hit in homebrew is that you can write the non-critical sections in C. Any attempts at C with the 65xx chips produce unusably slow code.
It's not the lack of suitability, but the lack of a compiler. Genesis has the latest GCC, arguably the best compiler in the world. SNES has nothing*, though I managed to use cc65 on it, cc65 doesn't count as a "real" SNES compiler in that it doesn't support it fully. It works, but it produces 8-bit code, which is not as fast as it could be on a 16-bit processor.
You can expect more SNES titles now that we have cc65 set up. Even with its limitations, it's a massive productivity improvement over asm.
*No, the WDC blob does not count. See previous threads.