TCC – Tiny C Compiler | Hacker News Reader

TCC – Tiny C Compiler

tinycc.org

156 pointsmutin-sa28 comments

I'm a huge fan of tcc. I use it on embedded systems -- a good trick is to pre-process any headers you need via cpp preprocessor, 'compress' them in a single file, and add your .c to that. That way you don't need to cart around all the -dev packages etc.

The 'hidden gem' of tcc is libtcc (the backend), which you can use as a JIT subsystem in your own code. For example I've written a full JIT translator for simavr [0] like that. The code translates each AVR opcode into it's own little piece of C, then compile the whole 'firmware' and runs it.

[0]: https://github.com/buserror/simavr/tree/wip/jit

Updated version here: http://repo.or.cz/tinycc.git

It segfaulted on a rpi (forgot which version), I wonder if the latest version from this will work.

Oddly this updated version has worse code generation than the last official release (at least on Windows). It uses 3 instructions just to push one arg to a function call!

From the website: "[Note: I am no longer working on TCC. Check the mailing list to get up to date information.]"

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13249851

I'm sure it's been posted more than that, though.

Fabrice Bellard's projects always make it to the front page every time they are posted.

What does he work on nowadays?

Well, he made it possible to run Windows 2000 in JavaScript: https://bellard.org/jslinux/vm.html?url=https://bellard.org/...

It works by running QEMU inside Linux inside a modified JSLinux, and then running Win2K inside QEMU.

JSLinux was modified to incorporate AMD's hardware-assisted virtualization instructions/extensions, so that QEMU could use KVM. This means that actual x86 emulation gets done in JavaScript layer, and you have (JavaScript (JSLinux(QEMU)) <-> Win2K) instead of (JavaScript(JSLinux(QEMU(Win2K))))), which would be... well I tried running Mini vMac (Mac 128K emulator) inside Basilisk II (PowerPC Mac emulator) one day... it was pretty much unusable, even though Classic Mac OS was designed for a 7.8MHz CPU.

So basically this wouldn't have been possible without implementing virtualization. Despite the fact that said virtualization is actually fake, and it's really emulation.

Probably because years after release they still get a wow out of most.

Is its preprocessor compliant yet? Last time I checked, the P99 project page said it fails to compile on tinycc.

Last time I tried it chokes compiling toybox too.

There are few C99 compliant compilers. In my opinion, TCC is a very good tool, and deserves being maintained.

It is a pitty that the QCC (QEMU Codegen) and TCC has not been materialized.

Any more info about QCC?

edit: googled it, https://www.landley.net/qcc/

For why that hasn't happened, see http://lists.landley.net/pipermail/qcc-landley.net/2017-Sept...

I would love to see it on Github rather than somewhere else, more people can engage and watch (Just saying)

GitHub mirror: https://github.com/TinyCC/tinycc

How would I go about creating a github mirror for some other project? I mean I get that I can just upload the project as it is, but what if I want it so that updates to the original are reflected automatically in the mirror?

> To set up your own mirror, you can configure a post-receive hook on your official project repository to automatically push commits to a mirror repository on GitHub.com (or GitHub Enterprise).

source: https://help.github.com/articles/about-github-mirrors/

so, basically, it either needs to be a repository you own or you would need to do cron job polling from some third machine.

Thanks.

Create a repo on GitLab where mirroring is in the default featureset, then create a repo on GitHub, then create a hook so that when the GitLab mirror pulls in new commits, it pushes those to the GitHub "mirror".

Or just question why you're doing this to begin with.

Interesting.

The motivation to put up the mirror is that the creator of the original project has no interest in changing his project to work with the languages' package manager, but has endorsed others mirroring it. So I could mirror the original project on Github and add the files needed for the languages' package manager to work with it.

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