Re: [Tinycc-devel] How do you use TCC?

[Tom Hartnett]

On 6/3/2012 2:38 PM, Stefano Zaglio wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I would like to get an idea of how TCC is used on concrete projects.
>
> If offtopic, possibly also to address@hidden
>
> thanks
>
> Stefano
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Tinycc-devel mailing list
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> https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/tinycc-devel
Stefano,

Background: We develop embedded software (OS, call processing, 
protocols, etc.) for telecommunications switching systems (TDM and 
VoIP).  Historically, we've done most of that development under 
GCC/Cygwin.  But every time there's a major new release of GNU/Cygwin 
and/or Windows, I "feel a lot of pain" and it takes us a non-trivial 
amount of time to regression test everything.  So I started taking a 
hard look at TCC as a lightweight (in a good way) alternative to GCC.  
(But I'm presently using TCC just as a "proof of concept" for an 
alternative code development environment.  We don't use it in anything 
"production" yet.)

The good new - With respect to compiling the literally millions and 
millions of lines of embedded code, TCC works better (and faster) than I 
could've hoped for!  Not only do we use TCC to compile the embedded 
code, but we also use it to compile our host-base tools (mostly 
command-line (console) apps.. not much in the way of Windows/GUI (but we 
de do SOME of that)) and our emulators (which are significant pieces of 
code).  On the side, I'm interested in math packages and Smalltalk 
programming and I use TCC to compile those environments as well.

As an aside, one of the major reasons I took a serious look at TCC was 
because we try to do a lot in a minimal footprint and a lot of our 
runtime debugging is designed to run on a RUNNING target.  And our 
debugger "likes" the traditional C language function call implementation 
wherein the instruction immediately after a call instruction is an add 
to the ESP (to "pop" the pushed arguments).  And with newer versions of 
GCC, that's not always possible (even if your specify the "appropriate" 
GCC option).

The only bad news (actually, it's more of a nuisance) is that several of 
the anti-virus packages we use (on laptops and home-based PCs) (e.g. 
Windows Security Essentials and AVG) quarantine a handful of the 
TCC-generated console EXEs.  I haven't had the time to see if it's a 
"pattern" of calling functions and DLLs that cause us trouble.

Regards,

Tom