picoc VS w64devkit

and picoc, but it also features interactive shell

I would like to try this C REPL: https://github.com/jpoirier/picoc

You can. People have written an interpreter for C, and you could write a compiler for Python.

Yeah, I would not choose to learn the C-shell simply because it shares a letter with the compiled language. You might be better served learning Pike or PicoC.

But don't get caught up in the VM definition, the whole act of compiling to VM bytecode and then to native is just another step in the chain. For example here is a C interpreter that lets you do the same thing, without intermediate bytecode.

Can we please cut the bullshit. By that logic no language is compiled. Because behold, a C interpreter: https://github.com/jpoirier/picoc

Languages can have a compiler, an interpreter, or both. Just because a language is commonly thought of as 'compiled' doesn't mean you can't write an interpreter for it, or vice versa. There's even C interpreters for crying out loud https://github.com/jpoirier/picoc .

Try w64devkit https://github.com/skeeto/w64devkit

Click "View raw" to download. The executable is just ~3kB. If you'd like to try building it yourself, I distribute a Windows XP-friendly, no-installation-required C and C++ toolchain, w64devkit. The 32-bit toolchains are labeled "i686" (on the right under "Releases"). The build command (cc ...) is at the top of the source file.

I bundle my preferred tools together in a standalone compiler toolkit for Windows: w64devkit. Except Git and documentation (see the links in the README), that's essentially everything I need to be productive.

I have a Dockerfile here that goes through all the steps bootstrapping a Mingw-w64 toolchain from source: https://github.com/skeeto/w64devkit

FWIW, both GNU objcopy and GNU ld (including e.g. the XCOPY-deployable ones from w64devkit[1]) are perfectly capable[2] of turning binary data into MSVC-acceptable COFF files with start and end symbols, while Free Pascal, for example, straight up ships with a bin2obj tool; the MSVC toolset is the outlier here.

[1] https://github.com/skeeto/w64devkit

[2] https://www.devever.net/~hl/incbin

Sounds like an high priority issue to solve first. I distribute a toolchain that doesn't require installation and includes a debugger: w64devkit (see "Releases"). You can pluck out the gdb.exe since it's statically linked and doesn't depend on anything else in the kit.

This particular case is a Windows program due to Winsock, and I happen to include all the above tools, except SDL2, a small Mingw-w64 distribution, w64devkit. So it doesn't take much!

Similar project providing slightly fewer tools: https://github.com/skeeto/w64devkit