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Comment by svnpenn | Hacker News Reader

I dont get it, doesnt the Zig project itself already do this?

The Zig project is able to compile C because it embeds LLVM. This is different and has different use cases, imo. Example: this may be a good alternative frontend for C compilation in Zig under specific scenarios.

I think incremental compilation and hotswapping are some of those use cases, but I could be wrong about that (I'm not entirely sure if/why LLVM can't do it)

It can partially do that already, thanks to CERN and others collaborating on its C++ JIT.

2021 LLVM Developers Meeting “Enabling Interactive C++ with Clang”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33ncbIQoa4c

Currently the best developer experience for hot code reload for C++ is Visual C++ 2022.

It would be fair to say this is mostly due in particular to the work of Vassil Vassilev and Axel Naumann rather than all of CERN.

If you're interested, they have monthly meetups open to the public, with fantastic speakers and presentations:

https://compiler-research.org/meetings/

Sure, I also didn't meant it was all of CERN. Back in my days, ROOT wasn't getting much love on my department, we were focused more in Python bindings.

The dmd D compiler now has an embedded C compiler, written in D. The purpose is so D code can read C declarations. It doesn't use clang.

For contrast, gforth (a prominent Forth interpreter, by Forth standards) generates+compiles+links binding code in C, at runtime, using the ordinary C toolchain. [0][1][2]

A bit 'out there' you may say, but on the plus side this approach enables handling header files and tidily expressing bindings without the need to implement their own C parser. [2]

[0] GitHub mirror: https://github.com/forthy42/gforth/blob/dda77d851ddeb80ca849...

[1] The official host: https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/gforth.git/tree/libcc.fs

[2] https://rosettacode.org/wiki/Call_a_foreign-language_functio...

Does this mean you can directly import C headers in D?

yes

How about static inline functions?

yes

Well well well, I guess it's time to brush off the ol' dmd.

There's a pretty good chance that "A C compiler written in ___" will be well-received here, regardless of ___.

To add to this, I feel like half of the good github projects are doing something just because you can.

Which, to be frank, is a wonderful thing.

In this case, though, it seems like embeddable C compilers as means to support integration of C code into other languages in better ways is becoming a trend.

> Future plans for the project include making it the C backend of Zig's translate-c feature and making it an optional C frontend for the self-hosted Zig compiler.

Yes, but thank goodness there's no quota.

I believe it calls into Clang/LLVM to do so.

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