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Comment by sigjuice | Hacker News Reader

From crystal-lang.org, Crystal is a compiled language

I never understood the phrase compiled language.

A compiled language uses a compiler to create a executable binary as opposed to a runtime that interprets or just-in-time compiles the language as it runs. Ruby is interpreted, C is compiled. Generally speaking, compiled languages are more performant but lack some of the flexibility of having a runtime available.

Crystal sacrifices some of Ruby's metaprogramming capabilities for performance and static type assurances.

There are many C interpreters.

I'm aware of PicoC, Cling (nee CINT), and Ch (commercial), but that's only three. What others are there? I'm curious about canonical C interpreters as well as things that aren't quite interpreting C but are somehow related.

Here is another http://compcert.inria.fr

[08/2011] Release of version 1.9 of the Compcert C compiler. Novelties include a reference C interpreter and stronger semantic preservation results.

Oh, another C compiler! I like collecting these - thanks! :)

Question for anyone handing out unofficial legal opinions:

This one is dual-licensed. There are a small kerfuffle of custom licenses that say "no commercial use", but everything is also variously covered by the GPL (v2 or later), LGPL v3, and BSD 3-clause.

Ref: https://github.com/AbsInt/CompCert/blob/master/LICENSE

I'm curious if I could use this in a commercial setting if I perfectly comply with the various GPL and BSD licenses.

If I could, that could be a problem for this group, because the repo readme (at https://github.com/AbsInt/CompCert) explicitly states "this is not free software."

tcc ?

https://bellard.org/tcc/ has:

C script supported : just add '#!/usr/local/bin/tcc -run' at the first line of your C source, and execute it directly from the command line.

Ah, I forgot tcc. Such an amazing system, so sad that development stalled.

FWIW, I think tcc compiles into RAM, then jmp-s to the result. Pretty much just eliminates the creation of an output file.

Do you genuinely not understand what they mean (that it produces binaries and isn't run in an interpreter or VM)?

I think their aim was to highlight the distinction between a language and an implementation of that language and possibly argue that only a particular implementation should be referred to as compiled/interpreted.

What I understand is that they invented a language called Crystal. And they made a compiler for it. The phrase "compiled language" is not very meaningful. It is quite possible for someone to make a Crystal interpreter.

Sure, but the goal of the language creator is to create a compiled Ruby-like language. As such, Crystal is by design meant to be compiled. Which is also the case for languages like C, C++, Go, etc.

What properties of C indicate that it is meant to be compiled? The word "compiler" does not appear in the ISO/IEC 9899:1999 standard (aka C99) in any meaningful way (there is just one sentence in a footnote).

That it's fairly close to assembly for a high level language, and most C that has ever been written has been compiled.

Okay, but it still seems strange to claim compiled-ness as some sort of intrinsic property of a language.

It's more a general descriptive of languages designed with compilation in mind.

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