[Tinycc-devel] Tinycc bugs/feedback

[Greg Haerr]

Fabrice,
    I just learned about TinyCC and I must say I'm extremely impressed.
You've done an amazing job.

Of course, given that I also love small things I thought I'd give it a
check-out and see how it compiles up Microwindows...  Following
are a few possible bugs and comments from my experience.  I've
only dedicated a half hour so far so bear with me.

source: tcc-0.9.10

tcc issues

1. In perusing the tcc source, is it correct that tctok.h, line 54 reads:

DEF(TOK_strcpy, "strlen")

Shouldn't that be "strcpy"?  This would only be an issue if
CONFIG_TCC_BCHECK is turned on.

2. My system didn't happen to have the directory 
/usr/local/share/man in existence.  This failed "make install".
Perhaps docs should be the last item in the install, or
have the install make the directory.  Of course, "man tcc"
still doesn't work on my (older) RH system since it doesn't
seem to check /usr/local/share/man.

Microwindows compilation issues
source: microwindows-0.89pre9 CVS

I modified Microwindows config file, Arch.rules and Makefile.rules
to remove things that gcc accepts like -O, -Wall.  Following
are the results.  All results do compile with gcc, admittedly
I realize they're not necessarily strictly ANSI.

3. The preprocessor directive #error is used in a couple of
places.  Tcc doesn't recognize it at all, and the #if/#endif processing
nesting gets screwed up.  This caused some havoc.  In one
case the #error was terminated by a \ with more text on the
next line.  Solution: //#error

4. #ifdef linux is not defined by tcc, but is by gcc.  Fix, "tcc -Dlinux=1"?

5. local functions aren't supported. (I'm rewriting this code now in mwin)

6. non-constant auto-declarations aren't allowed "int array[size];"
I'm rewriting this code now.

7. tcc segfaulted when compiling engine/devdraw.c. Haven't
figured this one out yet, I'll send more info.

Great job, I'm going to get tcc to compile up Microwindows,
and it will really be small!!

I don't know if there's been much discussion on what libc features
and functions are required for tcc, but I'd like to get into this
a bit.  Has this been discussed at much length?  I see some
folks are trying to get uClibc running with tcc.  What I'm interested
in is just what's needed to get tcc self-hosting, and also to compile
Microwindows.  (malloc, and a little file i/o.  I've got a very small
stdio I wrote 15 years ago that could work here...)

Regards,

Greg
Founder, The Microwindows Project
http://microwindows.org