Re: [Tinycc-devel] Using TinyCC with GPL

[Ivo]

On Friday 06 June 2008 21:56, Yann Renard wrote:
> Basile STARYNKEVITCH wrote:
> > Yann Renard wrote:
> >> I just discovered TinyCC. I would like to thank Fabrice and other
> >> authors for this very nice piece of software.
> >>
> >> I'm thinking of using Tiny CC to include C as a scripting language for
> >> a software I'm currently working on.
> >
> > I don't think that using C (or any other unsafe language) as a
> > scripting language is a good idea.
> >
> > The last thing you want from a scripting language is to core dump. You
> > need errors to be caught. This is not the case in C.
> >
> > If you want a scripting language, consider other options.
>
> thank you for your advice, even if it does not answer my question. My
> application is coded in C++ so I gues I can try/catch before calling the
> C script, right ? However, maybe I made a mistake calling this script.
> My use would better be very fast prototyping or light plugins. It has to
> run as fast as possible, this is why I consider using tinycc better than
> any interpreted bytecode.

AFAIK Fabrice's libtcc is LGPL, so linking it to a non-(L)GPL'd application 
should not be a problem as long as you publish any modifications you make 
to libtcc, etc... (comply with the LGPL for the library).

If you use Rob Landley's fork, your application must be GPL as Rob switched 
to the GPL for all of tinycc.

Keep in mind though that tcc is basically a non-optimising compiler. The 
compiled code is even slower than gcc -O0. If you do not really need the 
scripting facility, you might have a look at dlopen() for plugins and 
compile those with your favourite optimising compiler (gcc, icc, 
suncc, ...) instead.

--Ivo