8-Bit Labs

The HI-TECH C is a nearly ANSI C compliant compiler that runs on Z80 based CP/M machines. Version 3.09 was last released in March 1989 but the company has since made it freely available for both commercial and non-commercial use. Tony Nicholson has picked up development of the compiler and has released 17 patched versions of HI-TECH C on GitHub at agn453/HI-TECH-Z0-C.

You can download the latest binary distrubtion from htc-bin.lbr. A Z280 version is also available, z280bin.lbr. Each of these are uncompressed LBR files, so you should be able to copy them to a disk and extract them using DELBR.COM. If you are using RomWBW, I have submitted a pull request to include it as a disk so it will be available in the next release or now in the dev branch.

Setup

By default, HI-TECH expects it’s files to be in drive A in user area 0. If like me drive A is your CP/M drive then you will probably see the error Can't execute $EXEC you attempt to compile a C file.

To fix this, HI-TECH C uses environment variables to set the default drive to search for it’s files. You set the variables in a file ENVIRON on the A drive. I mount HI-TECH on the I drive in user area 0, so I add the following to the file,

HITECH=0:I:

You can also set a TMP variable for the drive to use for all the temporary files used during compilation. I am running RomWBW which has a fast RAM drive, so I set the variable to that drive,

TMP=B:

If you downloaded the LBR binaries, you will want to rename C309-17.COM to C.COM.

Hello World

Let’s write and compile Hello World to understand how it works. First create hello.c in your prefered editor, ZDE for example,

main()
{
     printf("Hello world\n");
}

This is pretty much as expected except that you do not need the #include <stdio.h> for printf and the return type for main is also not required.

You can then compile with,

I:C -V HELLO.C

-V is for verbose output and displays the following,

E>I:C -V HELLO.C
Hi-Tech Z80 C Compiler (CP/M-80) V3.09-17
Copyright (C) 1984-87 HI-TECH SOFTWARE
Updated from https://github.com/agn453/HI-TECH-Z80-C
0:I:CPP -DCPM -DHI_TECH_C -Dz80 -I0:I: HELLO.C B$CTMP1.$$$
0:I:P1 B$CTMP1.$$$ B$CTMP2.$$$ B$CTMP3.$$$
0:I:CGEN B$CTMP2.$$$ B$CTMP1.$$$
0:I:ZAS -N -OHELLO.OBJ B$CTMP1.$$$
ERA B$CTMP1.$$$
ERA B$CTMP2.$$$
ERA B$CTMP3.$$$
ERA B$CTMP5.$$$
0:I:LINQ -Z -Ptext=0,data,bss -C100H -OHELLO.COM 0:I:CRTCPM.OBJ HELLO.OBJ 0:I:LIBC.LIB
ERA HELLO.OBJ
ERA B$$EXEC.$$$

E>HELLO
Hello world

This created HELLO.COM in the same drive. Running it outputed the expected Hello world.

If I look at the program, it is a massive (for CP/M) 12K. If you don’t need wildcard argument support and I/O redirection using pipes, you can use the -N option to link with the smaller NRTCPM.OBJ file instead of CRTCPM.OBJ. Doing so results in a 6K file.

You can also run with the -Mfile.map option to generate a linker map showing the library modules included and their sizes.