Tiny C Compiler

The code of TCC (0.9.26) is kind hard to compile, I have discovered in the past year, while developing a minimal C compiler to compile the TCC sources [1]. For that reason, I have concluded that TCC is its own test set. It uses the constant 0x80000000, which is an edge case for if you want to print it as a signed integer only using 32-bit operators. There is a switch statement with an post-increment operator in the switch expression. There are also switch statements with fall throughs and with goto statements in the cases. It uses the ## operator where the result is the name of a macro. Just to name a few.

[1] https://github.com/FransFaase/MES-replacement

The unofficial repo continuing tcc has geoblocked the UK.

https://repo.or.cz/tinycc.git

Used in the impressive Guix bootstrap.

https://guix.gnu.org/manual/1.5.0/en/html_node/Full_002dSour...

There is an actively maintained fork with RISC-V support and such

https://repo.or.cz/w/tinycc.git

https://github.com/TinyCC/tinycc

Does anyone use libtcc for a scripting language backend? Smaller and faster than llvm. You'd have to transpile to a C ast I imagine.

Currently striving towards my own TypeScript to native x86_64 physical compiler quine bootstrapped off of TCC and QuickJS. Bytecode and AST are there!

I recall, there where similar items back in late 70s and early 80s .

Tiny C, Small C are names I seem to recall, buts its very fuzzy - Not sure if they were compilers, may have been interpreters....

What advantage does this have over SDCC?

Anyone know a good resource for getting started writing a compiler? I'm not trying to write a new LLVM, but being a "software engineer" writing web-based APIs for a living is leaving me wanting more.

There is even smaller C compiler that fits within the 512 bytes https://xorvoid.com/sectorc.html

This was the compiler I was required to use for my courses in university. GCC was forbidden. The professor just really liked tcc for some reason.

There also is an unofficial mirror which has updates.

https://github.com/TinyCC/tinycc

What a blast from the past TCC!

Sad but not surprised to see it's no longer maintained (8 years ago!).

Even in the era of terabyte NVMe drives my eyes water when I install MSVC (and that's usually just for the linker!)

TCC is fantastic! I use it a lot to do fast native-code generation for language projects, and it works really really well.

Man I can't wait for tcc to be reposted for the 4th time this week with the license scrubbed and the comment of "The Latest AI just zero-shotted an entire C compiler in 5 minutes!"

I mixed it up with LCC which was used in Quake 3. Still this is pretty cool.

TCC is fantastic! Very hackable, easy to compile to WASM for some interesting in-browser compilation