Re: [Tinycc-devel] (no subject)

[Philippe Ribet]

Guillaume POIRIER wrote:

> Hi,
>
> On 9/7/06, Mike B <address@hidden> wrote:
>
>
> > Is there a road map, or a todo list for this project? I was wondering 
> > how
> > much work there is to do to make this into a GCC drop in replacement?
>
>
> Please keep in mind that the years of experience that GCC has make it
> generate much better code that TCC can right now, and probably ever
> will.
> So if you're after just being able to replace gcc with a fast
> compiler, TCC can broaden its support of C language up to the point
> that it will compile most of C codes you throw at it...
>
> However, it's just not an achievable goal right now to expect TCC
> outperform GCC in code generation quality. It's all a matter of
> manpower and experience.
>
> Guillaume

In fact, it depends on what you mean by "drop in replacement". Of 
course, gcc generated code runs much faster. But as tcc generates code 
much faster, it may be very comfortable for everyday work to use it. 
While debuging everyday code, compilation time may be more critical than 
execution speed. For this to be practical, you need tcc to be a "drop in 
replacement", which in this context mainly means:
- support the same command line options (no need to rewrite all 
Makefiles), even if some (optimisations for example) are simply ignored
- support the same syntax (which here means gcc extensions)

Compiling the Linux kernel in few seconds is quite great, changing all 
Makefiles to do it would (is?) be unsatisfactory.

--
Philippe Ribet



                        The README file said
             "Requires Windows 95, NT 4.0, or better."
                   So... I installed it on Linux!