Re: else ladders practice

On 25/11/2024 11:21, Waldek Hebisch wrote:

Bart <bc@freeuk.com> wrote:

>
This seems to be a thing with Linux, where a big chunk of a C
implementation is provided by the OS.
>
That is, standard headers, libraries, possibly even 'as' and 'ld'
utilities. On Windows, C compilers tend to be self-contained (except for
Clang which appears to be parasitical: it used to piggy-back onto gcc,
then it switched to MSVC).

 You know that at source level there are separate projects: gcc proper,
binutils and libc.

Actually, no I don't. I said more on this in my reply to Keith a short while ago.
My experience of C compilers on Windows is that they provide a means to turn .c files into executable files. Such a compiler on Windows generally has to be self-contained, since very little is provided by the OS.
How the source code is structured, or how it's organised internally, is of little concern to me. My source code for cc.exe is also structured into different components, but I don't expect users to know or care about that.
Those terms are simply how Linux (and Unix I guess) has decided a C compiler should be organised.
So from my point of view, gcc is the outlier.
(See: https://github.com/sal55/langs/blob/master/CompilerSuite.md
This describes my current set of tools. Each .exe file is self-contained; no other program and no other file is needed to get from the input to any of the outputs.
Processing some outputs may need one of the other programs or an external tool, but that is by choice. Both mm.exe/cc.exe can go straight to EXE without any help.
The only thing not included in cc.exe is windows.h, because it is so massive.)

libc provides C library, however header should
be matched to the library, so libc also provides headers.

There is no header that I can see for Windows' msvcrt.dll C runtime. (There was/is a Windows SDK, but that is a massive product mostly to do with WinAPI.)

Linux has distributions, which beside bare OS provide a lot of packages.
Binary C library is used by almost all programs so is provided even
in minimal install.  Linux has package managers, so everyting you
install may be split into small packages, but for user it is just
knowing few crucial names, package manager will install all
dependencies.
 AFAIK Windows alone does not have a package manager and you apparently
reject package managers provided by third parties.  So the only
viable approach is to install big bundle ("self-contained compiler").

Other C compilers I've used on Windows (excluding monsters like gcc, clang, msvc) either have their own install routine or the process is trivial, such as extracting files from a ZIP file.
Mine doesn't even need installing: you just run the EXE from anywhere!