tinycc VS ocaml

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.

---

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

> OCaml’s configure script is also “normal”

If that’s this OCaml, it has a configure.ac file in the root directory, which looks suspicious for an Autotools-free package: https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml

You probably already know, but with OCaml 5 the only way to get flamegraphs working is to either:

* use framepointers [1]

* use LBR (but LBR has a limited depth, and may not work on on all CPUs, I'm assuming due to bugs in perf)

* implement some deep changes in how perf works to handle the 2 stacks in OCaml (I don't even know if this would be possible), or write/adapt some eBPF code to do it

OCaml 5 has a separate stack for OCaml code and C code, and although GDB can link them based on DWARF info, perf DWARF call-graphs cannot (https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/issues/12563#issuecomment-193...)

If you need more evidence to keep it enabled in future releases, you can use OCaml 5 as an example (unfortunately there aren't many OCaml applications, so that may not carry too much weight on its own).

[1]: I haven't actually realised that Fedora39 has already enabled FP by default, nice! (I still do most of my day-to-day profiling on an ~CentOS 7 system with 'perf --call-graph dwarf', I was aware that there was a discussion to enable FP by default, but haven't noticed it has actually been done already)

11. OCaml - $91,026

> It partially helps since it forces you to have types where they matters most: exported functions

But the problém the OP has is not knowing the types when reading the source (in the .ml file).

> How would it feels like to use list if only https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/blob/trunk/stdlib/list.ml was available,

If the signature where in the source file (which you can do in OCaml too), there would be no problem - which is what all the other (for some definition of "other") languages except C and C++ (even Fortran) do.

No, really, I can't see a single advantage of separate .mli files at all. The real problém is that the documentation is often worse too, as the .mli is autogenerated and documented afterwards - and now changes made later in the sources need to be documented in the mli too, so anything that doesn't change the type often gets lost. The same happens in C and C++ with header files.

If you have been in the Ruby community for the past couple of years, it's possible that you're not a super fan of types or that this concept never passed through your mind, and that's totally cool. I myself love the dynamic and meta-programming nature of Ruby, and honestly, by the time of this article's writing, we aren't on the level of OCaml for type checking and inference, but still, there are a couple of nice things that types with sorbet bring to the table:

Looks like there have been proposals to eliminate use of 3 operand lea in OCaml code (not accepted sadly):

https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/pull/8531

An amazing example is Ocaml lang logo / mascot. It might be useful to talk with them to know what was the process behind this work. The About page camel head on Perl dot org header is also a pretty good example of simplification, but it's not a logo, just a friendly illustration, as the O'Reilly camel is. Another notable logo for this animal is the well known tobacco industry company, but don't get me started on that (“good” logo, though, if we look at the effectiveness of their marketing).

Haskell and Agda are probably the most obvious examples. Ocaml too, but it is much older, so its type system is not as categorical. There is also Idris, which is not as well-known but is very cool.

That does sound problematic, but without the code it is hard to tell what is the issue. Typically, compiling a 6kLoc file like https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/blob/trunk/typing/typecore.ml takes 0.8 s on my machine.