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Re:Multiplying and Dividing on the 6502 (2021) by pcwalton on Tuesday June 28, 2022 @05:06PM (#31913007)
The 65816 has stack-relative addressing, and a relocatable direct page which can act as a sort of frame pointer, but it's still a far cry from being compiler-friendly. Severe annoyances include the painful lack of registers, having 8 and 16 bit be a global mode switch instead of just specifying the size in the instruction, lack of a barrel shifter, and the near/far pointer distinction. There's a reason why there have never been successful ports of GCC or LLVM to that architecture, even out of tree.
Re:Multiplying and Dividing on the 6502 (2021) by adamius on Tuesday June 28, 2022 @05:15PM (#31913112)
That's a little less true about LLVM. https://llvm-mos.org/wiki/Welcome They seem fairly sure that llvm can be convinced to support a 6502 target.

As for gcc, I'm fairly sure gcc has at least one out-of-tree but yeah perhaps the code wasn't as good as hand rolled.