[Tinycc-devel] Feature requests and bug report

[Arlen Keshabyan]

Hello,

My name is Arlen. I'm a programmer from Russia, so I'm sorry for my
bad English in advance.

First, let me thank you all (to whom it concerns) for TCC, for the
little precious Perl among the open source projects. Honestly, I've
used it as a scripting engine for my project. It shows great speed
results, it's easy and flexible to use. It exactly matches my
conceptions of a tool like TCC. While using it for awhile, I've
noticed some shortcomings. The first one is critical. It's about a
structure alignment. Consider the following code:

struct TestStructure
{
        char *_data;
        long long _size;
};

GCC tells me that this structure aligned by 8 bytes because 'long
long' type's size is 8 bytes. So, GCC used the longest type's size for
the structure alignment. Well, TCC aligned the same structure by 4
bytes. Because of this, this structure cannot be used for passing data
between my application and the TCC compiled code. The _size structure
member is inaccessible due to its different addresses (a shift from
the beginning of the structure) in TCC and GCC. So, I think TCC has to
align the structure by 8 bytes too, like GCC does it.

The second thing is about runtime behavior. If I include 'tcc.c' file
into my application with LIBTCC defined then compilation goes OK, but
an error comes out while runtime. The library requests the 'libtcc1.a'
file to be somewhere around. I do not want the standard c-runtime
'libtcc1' to be included in libtcc and I want to provide my own
runtime library by adding my symbols or using shared libraries. Can
you provide a way to choose whether to load libtcc1 library runtime or
not to?

The third one is a feature request. Can you provide a way to set a
callback function to process pragmas in a source code while parsing
it. For instance, a function called 'tcc_set_pragma_callback'. This
function is supposed to get a single string parameter that is a string
right after the pragma directive. And this callback function is
supposed to return an integer value that tells a parser to do
something or not to. This way we can extend functionality a bit. For
example:

#pragma shared(user32.dll, kernel32.dll, gdi32.dll, "C:/myfolder/myshared.dll")

This way I can add some libraries with 'tcc_add_library' function
requested in a source code. Or

#pragma once

I can tell a parser to skip the rest of a source code file by
returning a special value from my callback when it meets '#pragma
once' directive second time in the same file.

Anyway, a parser is supposed to call pragma callback function when it
meets an unknown pragma directive and I'm supposed to tell it what to
do – ignore the directive, ignore the whole file, stop parsing issuing
an error or do something else.

The fourth thing is about shared libraries. When I use tcc_add_library
function to load an executable file with exported functions then the
function fails to load it until you provide a .def file for the
executable. As far as I know it only understands .dll, .def and .a
file extensions. Right? If yes, can you do something to let load an
executable file as a shared library? As far as I know it's not so hard
to retrieve a list of exported functions from a shared library or
executable.

Telling the truth, TCC is almost the most amazing thing I've ever seen and used.
Thank you ever so much for this great experience.

I'm impatient to see your C++ additions, since using simple classes,
'new' and 'delete' operators, and a simple string object are the great
additions to TCC.

Best regards,
Arlen.