Re: question about linker

On Wed, 11 Dec 2024 05:37:15 -0000 (UTC)
antispam@fricas.org (Waldek Hebisch) wrote:

David Brown <david.brown@hesbynett.no> wrote:

On 30/11/2024 18:38, Bart wrote: 

It will at least work with more compiles.
 

 
And why would that matter?  No actual developer would care if their
code can be compiled by your little toy compiler, or even more
complete little tools like tcc.  Code needs to work on the
compilers that are suitable for the job - compatibility with
anything else would just be a waste of effort and missing out on
useful features that makes the code better. 

 
You are exagerating and that does not help communication.  In this
group there were at least one serious poster claiming to write code
depending only on features from older C standard. 

For some definition of "serious".

People like this
presumably would care if some "toy" compiler discoverd non-compliance.
Concerning tcc, they have explicit endorsment from gawk developer:
he likes compile speed and says that gawk compiles fine using tcc.
 
In may coding I use gcc extentions when I feel that there is
substantial gain.  But for significant part of my code I prefer
to portablility, and that may include avoiding features not
supported by lesser compilers.  I the past tcc was not able
to compile code which I consider rather ordinary C, and due
to this and lack of support for my main target I did not use
tcc.  But tcc improved, ATM I do not know if it is good enough
for me, but it passed initial tests, so I have no reason to
disregard it.
 
BTW: IME "exotic" tools and targets help with finding bugs.
So even if you do not normally need to compile with some
compiler it makes sense to check if it works.
 

I would think that the main reason for David Brown's absence of
interest in tcc is simply because tcc do not have back ends for
targets that he cares about.
In particular, Arm port appears to be abandoned in 2003, so quite
likely tcc can't generate code that runs on MCUs with ARMv7-M
architecture that happens to be released first in the same year and
officially named in the 2004.