Re: [Tinycc-devel] TinyCC's future

[Fabrice Bellard]

Neil Bradley wrote:
> I had been told at one time that anything beyond x86 was not in TCC's 
> future. That got me thinking - what is the intenet on TCC's future? It's 
> an honest question, not meant to flame or insult. I feel it's a sleekly 
> designed compiler with a potentially bright future - something to rival 
> the albatross that gcc has become. What it's ultimate goal?

I made TCC as a toy - my goal was to make the smallest self compiling C 
compiler. Then the project diverted and I should have stopped there :-)

I have no current plan for TCC except merging contributions from others 
I find interesting. People having contributed a significant amount of 
patches can be candidates to help me maintain the project.

It would be good to design a better code generator for TinyCC in the 
same spirit as the whole project (small and fast), but I have no 
motivation to do that yet and I found no code generator which fullfilled 
my needs.

Here are other simpler projects:

- Portability and cross compiling: allow TinyCC to cross compile for 
targets with different endianness and word size (32 or 64 bits).

- Portability and floats: use the soft float library for all floating 
point computations in the compiler.

- Fix remaining bugs to pass all the gcc 3.x validation tests.

- Add support for '-E' gcc option.

- Add an x86_64 code generator.

- Add a PowerPC code generator.

- Add a .net bytecode generator.

- Stricter type checking at some points (see the XXX in the code).

Fabrice.