This volume contains the proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on Software and Compilers for Embedded Systems (SCOPES 2004) held in A- terdam, The Netherlands, on September 2 and 3, 2004. Initially, the workshop was referred to as the International Workshop on Code Generation for Emb- ded Systems. The first took place in 1994 in Schloß Dagstuhl, Germany. From its beginnings, the intention of the organizers has been to create an interactive atmosphere in which the participants can discuss and profit from the assembly of international experts in the field. The name SCOPES has been used since the fourth edition in St. Goar, G- many, in 1999 when the scope of the workshop was extended to also cover general issues in embedded software design. Since then SCOPES has been held again in St. Goar in 2001; Berlin, Germany in 2002; Vienna, Austria in 2003; and now in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. In response to the call for papers, almost 50 very strong papers were s- mitted from all over the world. All submitted papers were reviewed by at least three experts to ensure the quality of the workshop. In the end, the program committee selected 17 papers for presentation at the workshop. These papers are divided into the following categories: application-specific (co)design, system and application synthesis, data flow analysis, data partitioning, task scheduling and code generation. In addition to the selected contributions, the keynote address was delivered by Mike Uhler from MIPS Technologies. An abstract of his talk is also included in this volume.