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Comment by kragen | Hacker News Reader

That's a good point, thanks. How complete is it?

By design, it's not a fully compliant ANSI C compiler, so it's never going to be complete, but it's complete enough to, for example, successfully compile Plan 9's driver for the Raspberry Pi USB controller with a minimal porting effort.

So, Dusk's compiler is not apple-to-apple comparable to the other, but comparable enough to give a ballpark idea that its code density compares very, very favorably.

It can be hard to tell how much extra complexity would be introduced by unimplemented features.

Indeed, and it might be why the author didn't try, but I still find it odd to not at least mention how small this C compiler is, even if it is to say that it's not apples-to-apples comparable. I mean, 8x smaller than the smallest C compiler listed is still something notable...

It certainly sounds like a perfectly usable C dialect.

It's complete in sofar as being capable of compiling C programs, but it has a few quirks.

https://git.sr.ht/~vdupras/duskos/tree/master/item/fs/doc/co...

Possibly this is why it wasn't mentioned? There are enough differences in that list that I can't imagine any existing C library would compile unchanged.

After using cc<< for non-trivial programs, it's about as quirky as the Plan 9 C compiler, the lack of multi-dimensional arrays is the one thing that trips me up the most with cc<<

> The "&&", "||" and "?:" operators do shortcutting.

is shortcutting different from short circuiting?

It's the same thing, I used the wrong term.

From what I can tell chibicc, unlike tcc, is not a complete c compiler in and of itself. Looking at its source code, it relies upon external tools for both x86_64 code gen and linking: https://github.com/rui314/chibicc/blob/90d1f7f199cc55b13c7fd...

It does rely on binutils, but by this standard GCC is not a complete C compiler either.

Relying on binutils and an assembler is fine. I don't think it really affects the internal complexity of the compiler much, but having textual assembly to look at can be handy for debugging the compiler, so it might reduce the human effort to get it working.

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