chibicc VS mold

If a --k&r mode was to be reliable, wouldn't it need to get specified first? Otherwise people would start relying on some edge case.

If speed is not a requirement for the --k&r mode, you could just take the tis-interpreter and note that if it runs without UB, it is still much faster than an actual computer was when k&r were active.

Would it even be possible to specify a variant of C that contains no UB (e.g. would define exactly what happens on unaligned access), but can compile practical existing C89 programs? I wonder if it could be written such that it could actually specify the behaviour consistently across the language intersection supported by both of e.g. GCC 2.95 and Chibicc[0].

Or maybe there are so many bugs in GCC 2.95 that it would simply be infeasible? How much time would it take to specify?

[0]: https://github.com/rui314/chibicc

I was on the Eclipse Foundation call a few days ago regarding this topic and they said there was a well-established 3-part test for this in the EU courts. But I don't think I managed to take a screenshot, sorry.

Here is a snippet from the EU Blue Guide linked the from the Eclipse blog post:

"Commercial activity is understood as providing goods in a business related context. Non-profit organisations may be considered as carrying out commercial activities if they operate in such a context. This can only be appreciated on a case by case basis taking into account the regularity of the supplies, the characteristics of the product, the intentions of the supplier, etc. In principle, occasional supplies by charities or hobbyists should not be considered as taking place in a business related context."

I would consider GCC or React to fit this definition, while a hobby project like https://github.com/rui314/chibicc not to fit it.

chibicc

chibicc: https://github.com/rui314/chibicc (A reasonably digestible C implementation)

When you say a fork of LLVM, am I correct in assuming that you specifically mean a fork of Clang? I don't see how the compiler backend would affect support for language extensions, regardless of whether it's an exception to that such as Tcc, Cproc, the MIR C jitter, lacc, 8cc, 9cc, and chibicc. Most of those are not for production, excluding Cproc and Tcc (at least according to Suckless or Oasis).

I think this is unlikely to gain traction. I say that no to discourage you, just to explain.

- The community has an instinctive distrust of closed source or a compiler from an untrusted source. If you’re familiar with the Trusting Trust attack you’ll understand why.

- Dev tools in every language ecosystem are almost always free, unless they involve some kind of hosting. People aren’t used to opening their wallets. Look the experience of the guy who built the mold linker(https://github.com/rui314/mold). Far superior to the state of art, improves incremental compiles a lot, widely applicable across ecosystems (C, C++, Rust), CPU architectures and Operating Systems. You don’t even have to modify your compiler, just need to point to his linker. He’s even giving it away for free for personal use. But still, almost no one uses it. The inertia of the established options is really high.

- It’s not complex enough. Think about the complexity involved in the cranelift backend. No one can seriously recreate the efforts of bjorn3. If we could have, we would have. But the idea idea here can be recreated, especially by the experts who already built incremental compilation into rustc.

- But if your solution is truly complex, like the parallel frontend, the burden of maintaining a fork would be too high. You’d have to spend all your time rebasing.

Again I’m not trying to discourage you, just stating the difficulties of making a business in the dev tools space. You would be better off contributing this excellent work to the community and trying a different tack.

I initially thought this would be about the mold linker (https://github.com/rui314/mold)

I assume this submission is trying to highlight the specific message (2023-01-24) : https://github.com/rui314/mold/issues/190#issuecomment-14028...

Fyi... the author wrote a more expansive blog post about selling dev tools a few months later (2023-06-06) and there was a related HN thread about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36225016

Loongson's LoongArch CPU has been supported. (03b1a1c)

I'm amazed at how quickly the author responds to requests: https://github.com/rui314/mold/issues/1057

From the report to the fix in less than two days.

I'm not sure how competitive it will be with lld, especially if we consider ThinLTO (which takes multiple minutes on 64-core machine) - it can make the advantages of mold insignificant.

What other solutions have you tried for the problem of slow linking? You haven't even said which linker and what flags you're using. I haven't actually tried it, but the author of gold has an even faster linker called mold: https://github.com/rui314/mold

> Mold did it first, though: https://github.com/rui314/mold

Before LLD?