Re: Baby X is bor nagain

On 18/06/2024 18:02, James Kuyper wrote:

bart <bc@freeuk.com> writes:

On 18/06/2024 14:39, James Kuyper wrote:

On 17/06/2024 21:24, bart wrote:
...

If you don't need optimised code right now, why would you invoke gcc
rather than tcc? It's a no-brainer.

>
On virtually every occasion when I've heard someone claim that a given
decision is a no-brainer, I would generally make a different decision if
I actually applied my brain to the issue. This is no exception.
>

>
So your brain would tell you to choose a tool which takes at least 10
times as long to do the same task?

 No, "the task" isn't "compile a program", it's "develop a program",
which includes only a quite negligible amount of time spent compiling it.
What I know about TCC is relatively limited, but the Wikipedia article
is consistent with what I though I knew. It says that tcc supports all
of the features of C90, most of C99, and some gnu extensions. That is
not the dialect of C I want to write in. I want full conformance with
the latest official version of C, with any unintentional use of gnu
extensions flagged with a diagnostic.
Having to write my code in a crippled version of C would be a waste of
my time, and having to fix it to take advantage of the features of a
more modern version of C when I'm ready to optimize it would be a
further waste of time. I'd save far more development time by writing in
the same dialect of C from the very beginning, then I could ever
possibly save by dividing entirely negligible compile times by a factor
of 10.

No, the task in my examples was to turn the validated C generated by a program into runnable binary.
The C can be generated very quickly; then invoking gcc, even using -O0, would be like hitting a brick wall. With Tiny C, the whole process is more fluent.
My generated C tends to be very conservative. The most controversial feature it has is the use of "$" in identifiers, which Tcc for some reason doesn't support by default unless you enable it with a long-winded option (see the examples I showed).
This use of C is fairly common among programming languages, where you don't need a lot of fancy analysis, since that has already been done by the front end compiler. And it doesn't really need extra features either; that's also taken care of.