Re: [OT] Non-GCC compilers used for linux userspace

Rob Landley
2006-03-30T01:37:03Z

On Wednesday 29 March 2006 4:23 pm, Nix wrote:
> On Tue, 28 Mar 2006, Rob Landley announced authoritatively:
> > I play with Fabrice Bellard's Tiny C Compiler (http://www.tinycc.org),
> > and hope to get a distro compiled with it someday, at least as a proof of
> > concept.
>
> It's a nifty idea, a sort of uClibc of C compilers. Alas it's useless on
> almost all my systems because it's x86-only by design...

Actually according to the changelog version 0.9.21 grew support for ARM, and I
believe it supports some other platforms too.

Notice that Fabrice Bellard (who wrote it) is also the guy behind qemu. My
vague understanding of how things went is that at some point after doing
tccboot, he was decoupled the C parser from the code generator in order to
retarget tcc to produce code for other platforms, and got the idea of
producing different front-ends too so it could input something other than C,
namely machine code.

The result was qemu, which sort of compiles machine code to machine code
dynamically, and which has taken up a large chunk of his time ever since.
(The speed of tcc development has tailed off noticeably since, but he still
spends a little time on it, and there are other developers...)

> > That aims for full c99 and is already implementing a lot of gcc stuff
> > too.
>
> Good for it, as long as it doesn't go on to define __GNUC__ like icc did
> at one point (even though it doesn't implement all GCC
> extensions)... but Fabrice is sane so I doubt he'd do anything that
> loopy.

That's more a header issue anyway. That's the uClibc developers problem. :)

Rob
--
Never bet against the cheap plastic solution.