Tiny-C Compiler

Re:Tiny-C Compiler by vidarh on Monday March 13, 2023 @10:08AM (#35135904)

Since they say "scripts", note that tcc supports being invoked in the shebang line. E.g.

    #!/usr/bin/tcc -run

You can do that with gcc/clang too (e.g. #if 0, #endif to wrap a block of shell script to compile the current file and execute the result) but a primary value of tcc is that it compiles fast.

On a more philosophical note, the suckless approach is to optimise for simplicity not storage. It's perfectly valid to disagree with that of course, but if simplicitly of the system as a whole is a consideration gcc and clang doesn't really fit.

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Re:Tiny-C Compiler by LukeShu on Monday March 13, 2023 @06:11PM (#35143717)

You can only sort of do that with gcc/clang. The #if 0 trick relies on funny behavior that is in a few common shells. When you try to execve(2) a script without a proper #! shebang, the kernel will return ENOEXEC. Bash will check for ENOEXEC then check a few heuristics to see if it looks like a text file, and if it does, then it will try to run it as a shell script.

This means that your script will work when run from a shell, but won't work when exec()ed from a non-shell program, which is a weird foot-gun.

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Re:Tiny-C Compiler by vidarh on Tuesday March 14, 2023 @09:05AM (#35150813)

That makes sense. When I checked the tcc command line I was mildly surprised to see you could do the #if 0 hack at all, so not surprised to hear it has severe limitations.

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