Re: [Tinycc-devel] TCC -- Dead or Alive?

[Rob Landley]

On Friday 27 April 2007 9:38 am, address@hidden wrote:
> You're right- it has been along time since the last release, and it *is* a
> great project.

I've been pondering putting out a release but haven't figured out what to call 
it to distinguish it from the "official" line.  (Possibly take a clue from 
the -ac and -mm kernels and do a tcc-rl1.)

I have a todo list with three or four items I'd want to get fixed before a 
release.  I have a crashtcc.c that does, which I need to fix.  I want a 
proper fix to the `char blah[] = ("string")` issue.  I want to test on recent 
Ubuntu, and I've got some windows patches people have sent.  Plus I need to 
rip the #*%(&%# makefile a new one so it doesn't confuse host and target.  
(Try building tcc on x86-64.  The fact it doesn't have an x86-64 _target_ 
shouldn't stop it from producing x86-64 binaries that output x86 and arm 
code.)  Oh, and somebody told me that Fabrice's cleaned up -E was better than 
the original -E patch I merged, and I keep meaning to compare them...

And it should really grow an x86-64 target, but I don't quite know what's 
involved yet and that won't hold up a release...

And I'm partway through breaking the thing up into multiple source files so 
it's a little more manageable, but there's some non-obvious tangles (and 
overuse of "static", and #includes of .c files partway through another .c 
file, and so on) in there that takes some careful untangling...

And I'm -> <- this close to just replacing the makefile with a darn shell 
script to compile the thing, for reasons I should rant about at some point.

> It's sort-of-alive, mostly being maintained in a repository hosted by Rob
> Landley, who is the main person putting time into it.  The link to his
> repository has been posted on the list a few times.

http://landley.net/code/tinycc

I'm not an expert on this, I just care.  I'm on about page 40-something of the 
200+ page printout of tcc.c I made, in a 3-ring binder.

I haven't gotten a darn thing accomplished since Penguicon last weekend, but 
in my defense I _did_ get married there... :)

> As far as I can tell, 
> the original author doesn't spend much time on it.

For Fabrice qemu is understandably a bit of a time sink. :)

He offered to hand the project off, but I'm not touching a CVS repository on 
an FSF website, and he doesn't consider my fork official.

> Erik L Nelson

Rob