Re: [Tinycc-devel] linking tinycc

[Basile Starynkevitch]

On Sat, 2014-01-04 at 14:20 +0100, Christian Jullien wrote:
> tcc and gcc are different. Gcc is an external tool that produces binary. 
> There is absolutely no problem for gcc to have GPL License.
> The same applies for tcc for those who use tcc to produce binaries.
> A very nice feature of tcc is that it can be used embedded in another program 
> to compile C code on the fly.
> For example, my ISLISP version named OpenLisp (www.eligis.com) has a compiler 
> that compiles lisp file to C source code.
> Currently, whether I use VC++, gcc, tcc, lcc, Watcom C... or any C compiler I 
> support, the process is to compile the generated source code and link the 
> binary into a new executable.
> It would be nice to compile lisp code 'on the fly' with libtcc without having 
> to exit Lisp, compile, link and launch a new Lisp to use new compiled 
> function.

You don't need libtcc for that.

You should generate C code into yourgenerated.c file, fork any compiler
(e.g. gcc, clang, tcc, ....) to compile it into a dynamically loaded
library (with GCC on Linux, that means gcc -Wall -fPIC -O -shared
yourgenerated.c -o yourgenerated.so) then dynamically load the produced
shared library (i.e. dlopen).

I'm doing that routinely in MELT http://gcc-melt.org/ which is a Lispy
domain specific language to extend GCC: I'm generating C++ code suitable
for GCC internals, then compiling and dlopen-ing it, and all that in the
same process (a cc1 or cc1plus started by some other gcc -fplugin=melt).


AFAIK, all the major operating systems (Linux, AIX, Windows, Hurd,
MacOSX ...) have dynamic loading facilities.

Happy new 2014 year to everyone.

Regards.

-- 
Basile STARYNKEVITCH         http://starynkevitch.net/Basile/
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