Re: [Tinycc-devel] Almost added a feature, but I broke things

[Kyryl Melekhin]

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kyx0r/klec/master/utils/tinycc.c

on x86_64 linux compile like so gcc tinycc.c -ldl -lpthread
then you can use it like so:

if the project already has something resembling a unity build:
a.out -E file1.c > file2.c

if the project does incremental build:
use cat on every C file in correct order ignore the headers.
cat *.c > file1.c
a.out -E file1.c > file2.c


To better understand how it works I recommend to try it on tcc
code base first. Tcc code actually is layed out in an easy format
despite make forcing the incremental build.
a.out -E tcc.c > tinycc.c
This current version the result should amount to approx 87K loc

Some comments:
1. If the headers in C source are not guarded properly
it will not work, but so will your project not compile also. So
this does not happen. Header exclusion works the same way a compiler
would exclude it.
2. Problem of amalgamation is not as trivial as you think it might be,
because of the nature of how C works your header might be guarded but
you can also have code outside of that guard, in any case my program will
exclude the code properly. Especially that #endif is used to terminate any kind
of preprocessing expression.
3. By default headers with <> (system headers) are not amalgamated.
You can enable that, just read the source code in tcc_preprocess.
This program is powered by strategically placing printfs inside tcc
and some compiler logic changes of the default option -E, so don't try
to use this tcc for anything except what is meant to be.
4. While in most cases the resulting file will compile, some projects might be
weird and still require some manual tweaks and edits. Also you might need
to spend some time to clean the code from extra newlines that might get
created.
5. You can also configure it in source code to instead of processing everything
actually do the preprocess and exclude all the unnecessary junk, so for example
with that tcc source for x64 linux will be about ~35K instead of 87K.