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Comment by sklogic | Hacker News Reader

Pascal got a very nice property - it can be compiled in one pass, literally, by spitting out code while parsing. Nothing can be simpler than that. Interpretation is significantly more complicated.

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IIRC tcc, Bellard's tiny c compiler, works this way. It emits very naive native code, but it chomps source code fast enough to boot linux 2.4 from source under 10 seconds years ago.

Ideally it does one pass, except under the following conditions:

    For initialized arrays with unknown size, a first pass is done to count the number of elements.
    For architectures where arguments are evaluated in reverse order, a first pass is done to reverse the argument order.

From: http://bellard.org/tcc/tcc-doc.html

This great code to read. I need to get back to playing with it again.

Ha, I tried to poke inside tcc, aiming at booting linux 3.x, and missed that link.

ps: it's also still under development http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/tinycc-devel/ .. impressive.

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"tcc still compiles around 10x faster but runs x3.5 times slower." from tcc homepage 3rd benchmark URL http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/tinycc-devel/2013-02/ms...

That's a good little mailing list. The biggest issue seems to be keeping tcc working across all supported platforms when changing stuff for a single platform.

tcc can actually be made to build Windows executables in the 'old-school' "Programming Windows" way, which is quite fun.

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