Re: [Tinycc-devel] bytecode

[Anton Ertl]

Shawn Rutledge wrote:
> 
> On 10/11/05, Evan Langlois <address@hidden> wrote:
[targeting JVM etc.]
> > You gotta love modern computing.  C code being compiled to bytecode to
> > be interpretted by a massive bulky virtual machine written in C ... and
> > the benefit is ... portability between architectures?

For JVM etc., I agree (and the design of the JVM makes it pretty hard
to target it from tcc).

However, a VM designed to be a tcc target does not have to be that
bulky (less than 100KB).  Concerning the advantage, it would be that
you would get the advantages of tcc (in particular, compilation speed)
on platforms that have not have had a native tcc target yet.  Run-time
speed would suffer, true, but I don't think that anybody chooses tcc
if they want the best run-time speed around.

> Well at least the abstract machine code and translator are
> interesting, even if using C as the "high level language" is not.=20

Not sure what you mean with the "high level language" here, but in any
case, GNU C (or, more generally, C with labels-as-values) is an
excellent language for implementing virtual machine interpreters.

- anton