tinycc VS Inline-Perl5

A better solution is just to write a plain ass shell script that tests if various C snippets compile.

https://github.com/oilshell/oil/blob/master/configure

https://github.com/oilshell/oil/blob/master/build/detect-pwe...

Not an unholy mix of m4, shell, and C, all in the same file.

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These are the same style as a the configure scripts that Fabrice Bellard wrote for tcc and QEMU.

They are plain ass shell scripts, because he actually understands the code he writes.

https://github.com/qemu/qemu/blob/master/configure

https://github.com/TinyCC/tinycc/blob/mob/configure

OCaml’s configure script is also “normal”.

You don’t have to copy and paste thousands of lines of GNU stuff that you don’t understand.

(copy of lobste.rs comment)

I can highly recommend libtcc (https://github.com/TinyCC/tinycc.git) for this kind of thing. I recently ported the code developed in linux on an ARM chromebook to a generic windows box in 20 minutes.

I think it's a pretty nice prog.lang. You may be very happy. Though nothing is perfect, there is much to recommend it. By now I've written over 150 command-line tools with https://github.com/c-blake/cligen . A few are at https://github.com/c-blake/bu or https://github.com/c-blake/nio (screw 1970s COBOL-esque SQL) or in their own repos.

If it helps, I like to use the "mob branch" [0] of TinyCC/tcc [1] for really fast builds in debugging mode, but this may only work if you toss `@if tcc: mm:markAndSweep @end` or similar in your nim.cfg. Then I have a little `@if r: ...` so I can say `nim c -d:r foo` for a release build with gcc/whatever.

[0] https://repo.or.cz/w/tinycc.git

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiny_C_Compiler

I have found the libtcc from https://github.com/TinyCC/tinycc to be absolutely fantastic. I'm using it to instantaneously compile the C output from my hobby language to create a repl. Once I had the compiler in good shape it allowed me to create a 100% compatible interpreter for (basically) free.

The libtcc API is minimal. For my needs that has been 100% sufficient and a pleasure to work with.

The latest version that people are working with can be found on the 'mob' branch at https://repo.or.cz/w/tinycc.git

Instead of interpreters, if one has less of a "must be a full featured prog.lang" mentality and a fast compiler like Go or Nim [1] (or is willing to wait, for slow optimizing compiles to apply against big data sets) then an end-to-end simpler design for "one-liners" (or similarly simple programs) is the whole program generator. Maybe "big IFs", but also maybe not.

To back up my simplicity claim, consider rp [2] -- like 60 non-comment/import/signature lines of code for the generator. Generated programs are even smaller. But, you can deploy gcc or clang or whatever against them and make fast libraries in the host language.

Why, if you are willing to write those little generation command options in C99 then you can compile the harness with tcc [3] in about 1 millisecond which is faster than most interpreter start-up times - byte code or otherwise - and can link against gcc -O3 (or whatever) helper libraries.

Anyway, I only write this because in my experience few people realize how much development cost they buy into when then insist on a full featured prog.lang, not to criticize Ben's work. You also make users need to learn quirks of that new language instead of the quirks of a "harness" which may be fewer.

[1] https://forum.nim-lang.org/

[2] https://github.com/c-blake/cligen/blob/master/examples/rp.ni...

[3] https://repo.or.cz/w/tinycc.git

I think it is. At least there have been some recent activity in https://repo.or.cz/w/tinycc.git

Verbatim from the documentation at https://github.com/niner/Inline-Perl5: use Inline::Perl5;

> Perl 6 was treated as the successor of Perl 5 -- and that was the mistake. It meant Perl 5 started dying,

Perl 6 took a long time to make, but how much did that matter? What was Perl going to do about Rails, Clojure, Go, Rust, JS/TS, and more? The world of programming languages used to be a lot smaller than it is today.

> Perl 6 had a new different syntax.

Inline::Perl5 [3] allows running legacy Perl 5 code in Perl 6 codebases.

[1]: https://docs.raku.org/language/5to6-nutshell#Regular_express...

[2]: https://github.com/atweiden/voidvault

[3]: https://github.com/niner/Inline-Perl5

Perl can be faster and defiantly nicer to work with than PHP but it's nowhere near as fast as some other options like Rust but that has the downside of being much harder to write and get working. Perl has the advantage of being prepackaged with the base system and on OpenBSD it's kept up fairly well with the system version currently being only one version behind the latest yearly Perl release. There are some patches added to the OpenBSD version so updating it each year takes time. The easiest way that I've found for running Perl websites is to leave the system modules as is and to install all of the modules that you need into a users home directory with local::lib and cpanm. That way the system install isn't contaminated with the extra modules and it makes deploying easy because it's all contained in one users home directory that can be rsync'd or tar'd. Another nice thing is you get access to pledge and unveil through Perl so you can lock down your website even further. I've recently been trying out doing things in Raku (Perl6 was renamed to Raku in 2019). It's slower than Perl most of the time but I find Raku to be so much more beautiful and expressive that it's a joy to code with. There aren't as many modules available right now for Raku but it gives you access to all of CPAN through the Inline::Perl5 module.

Interfacing with Perl 5 with Inline::Perl5:

I'll be happy to dialog about this compatibility, but the key thing is to start with an open mind; a recognition that the original vision predated Parrot; and a recognition that Rakoons have never relinquished that original vision even while many of us are delighted that Perl folk are keeping Perl healthy as a separate thing in its own right.

To be clear, the realization of Larry's original vision is not constrained to interop with Perl. Raku has extraordinary potential, some already realized, for pan-language compatibility via its [Inlines](https://modules.raku.org/search/?q=inline).

The steady improvement of [the exemplar Inline](https://github.com/niner/Inline-Perl5) for the last 6 years; its evident maturing; its suitability as a solid blueprint for upgrading all the others; all of this bodes well for being able to use a lot of the world's best existing code from within Raku this decade, with Inline::Python quite plausibly shining in this regard within the next 2-3 years.

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/a/45181464/1077672

The most polished of the Inlines, namely Inline::Perl5 (github repo) enables devs to instantiate Raku objects that are instances of Raku classes that are sub-classes of Perl classes. It does this even though Perl has pluggable OO, essentially arbitrary OO, with dozens of different OO systems available, all of which differ from Raku's, for example having a variety of MRO linearizations that aren't C3. So such things can be done.