Re: [Tinycc-devel] Using TCC as a backbone for our compiler

[grischka]

Jerome St-Louis wrote:
> The problem with that however, as I mentioned before, is that the
> generated C code makes use of some GCC extensions which I believe are
> not available in TCC... (Some very useful stuff for code generation,
> such as statements as an expression for example). There's maybe one or
> 2 of them... One solution would be to implement those and we could
> make a lot of progress in that direction.

TCC supports statement expressions, such as:

    return ({ int a=4, b=3; a+b; });

> Another problem is that there are some issues with C code generation,
> such as required prototyping and reordering of declarations which
> causes us many headaches ...

I see.  Actually TCC treats function and struct ptr mismatch as
errors,  however it could be made warnings as needed.

> which could get rid of if we were to skip the
> intermediate C code.
>
> Assembly would be a little low level however and what you're proposing
> of providing an interface for those generators brings up sparkles in
> my eyes. We'd be happy to work on that to make it possible to plug at
> a more C-like level.

Well, "providing" was maybe misleading.  For TCC we would like to be
able to _use_ such generators, eventually.   Basically we could first
improve the interface of TCC's own generator,  then tune TCC's frontend
such that it can use this interface, and then try to use other generators
alternatively, eventually.  If that makes sense.

Once we have this "improved interface" to TCC's generator it could be
used by your compiler as well, of course.  Including the capability
to run the code JIT or to write out executables for linux and windows.

--- grischka