For the purposes of experimenting with a Pololu stepper motor driver, I wanted to generate pulses from a PIC running a simple program. This meant downloading and installing the latest tools from Microchip for 8-bit PIC development: The MPLAB X IDE, the XC8 compiler, and the MPLAB Code Configurator (MCC).

With these tools set up, I pulled down my previous PIC stepper motor project intending to use it as a starting point. The stepper driver portion will be different, but I wanted the analog dial capability to adjust speed and direction. Before I start modifying code, though, I hit “Build” to make sure everything still compiled.

It did not.

In file included from mcc_generated_files/mcc.c:74:
In file included from mcc_generated_files/mcc.h:52:
mcc_generated_files/interrupt_manager.h:110:6: error: variable has incomplete type 'void'
void interrupt INTERRUPT_InterruptManager(void);
^
mcc_generated_files/interrupt_manager.h:110:15: error: expected ';' after top level declarator
void interrupt INTERRUPT_InterruptManager(void);
^
;
2 errors generated.
(908) exit status = 1

Since “void” is a very fundamental type for C programs, this error tells me this isn’t the matter of a minor typo, something is wrong at a very basic level. As a test, I created a new MPLAB project with a bare skeleton generated by MCC. This “Hello World” program failed to compile in the same way, indicating the problem is a system configuration issue.

A little digging around found the issue was introduced with XC8 compiler version 2.0, introduced just a few months ago in May. It moves C language support up to C99, keeping up with industry standards. However, this change also broke compatibility with old code. Not just old code sitting on a hobbyist’s Github page, but also old boilerplate code generated by MCC.

I expect that Microchip will eventually update these templates in a future MCC update, but for now, PIC programmers that use MCC for rapid prototyping will need to change their project settings to fall back to the older C90 standards. See xc8 2.0 migration document here for more details on this workaround.