tinycc VS mold

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

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?