5 ms·

is it practical in any way?

mythz 6y ago
Yes, for winning IOCCC competitions! Which would normally be a great CV badge to demonstrate your skills to prospective employers, but likely of little consequence if you're Fabrice.
- jacquesm 6y ago
  > Which would normally be a great CV badge to demonstrate your skills to prospective employers Not many employers would know of the IOCCC.
  - bregma 6y ago
    > Not many employers would know of the IOCCC. Sure. But who wants to work flipping burgers, greeting shoppers, or doing web front-ends for the rest of their life?
  - regularfry 6y ago
    If you have the sort of brain that makes winning IOCCC entries, it is highly probable that a candidate employer who has not heard of it is not, in fact, prospective.
  - bidirectional 6y ago
    Anyone interviewing an IOCCC winner probably has.
  - f00zz 6y ago
    can confirm source: won the IOCCC
- em500 6y ago
  It's probably of little consequence for his employment, but Bellard has won a few IOCCC prices: https://www.ioccc.org/winners.html#B https://www.ioccc.org/winners.html#B
scruffyherder 6y ago
At one point a variation of it could compile a Linux kernel (very fast too!) and boot from the same ISO. Of course GCC or LLVM produced better optimised code, but TCC, being so small runs so much faster.
notorandit 6y ago
It isn't as it compiles a subset of c. Nonetheless it's a gem!
wolf550e 6y ago
Suppose you want to defeat a "Reflections on Trusting Trust" attack and bootstrap a toolchain source code you believe is clean to produce binaries that are clean. You need to compile llvm/clang (or gcc). You start with something small you can audit manually, use it to build binaries that can compile llvm, then use llvm to build itself to get an optimized compiler that doesn't have malicious code to recognize the password check inside the login binary and emit machine code that is not faithful to the source code.
- Drakim 6y ago
  How do you know that your text editors aren't compiled to hide the payload when examining this compiler, thus perpetuating the hidenness?
  - xmodem 6y ago
    If you wanted to solve for that, you would have to build a computer like the monster6502 [1] to run the compiler on, and visually inspect the memory contents. 1: https://monster6502.com/ https://monster6502.com/
    - MawKKe 6y ago
      How do you know the person who designed that isn't in on it?
      - archi42 6y ago
        The thing is pretty easy to verify. The ultimate question is: How far do you need to go until you believe that the earth is indeed not flat? Do you trust your teachers? Stand on a tall building? Take a balloon ride? A plane? A spaceship? Then still, at which point can you rule out that the earth just appears to be a ball due to some yet-to-be-explained phenomenon (gravitational anomaly?) but is indeed flat? (The correct answer of course is "turtles all the way down").
        6y ago
cb321 6y ago
Another practical application is using tinycc as a backend compiler for Nim [1]. I set up my nim.cfg to default to this for a rapid edit-compile-test cycle (usually under 250 millisec), with a quick define switch to move to gcc-optimized code. Similar is likely possible for other prog.langs that emit C. One helpful feature for the full round-trip to an executable file is a built-in object file linker. Also, libtcc can be used as a library to "compile a string" and then run it which is the JIT application mentioned elsewhere in this thread. [1] https://nim-lang.org https://nim-lang.org
caf 6y ago
Android once included a library "libacc", (the Android "Almost" C Compiler") which was based on the deobfuscated version of this. https://android.googlesource.com/platform/system/core/+/eclair-release/libacc/acc.cpp https://android.googlesource.com/platform/system/core/+/ecla...

Yes, for winning IOCCC competitions! Which would normally be a great CV badge to demonstrate your skills to prospective employers, but likely of little consequence if you're Fabrice.

jacquesm 6y ago
> Which would normally be a great CV badge to demonstrate your skills to prospective employers Not many employers would know of the IOCCC.
- bregma 6y ago
  > Not many employers would know of the IOCCC. Sure. But who wants to work flipping burgers, greeting shoppers, or doing web front-ends for the rest of their life?
- regularfry 6y ago
  If you have the sort of brain that makes winning IOCCC entries, it is highly probable that a candidate employer who has not heard of it is not, in fact, prospective.
- bidirectional 6y ago
  Anyone interviewing an IOCCC winner probably has.
- f00zz 6y ago
  can confirm source: won the IOCCC
em500 6y ago
It's probably of little consequence for his employment, but Bellard has won a few IOCCC prices: https://www.ioccc.org/winners.html#B https://www.ioccc.org/winners.html#B

scruffyherder 6y ago

At one point a variation of it could compile a Linux kernel (very fast too!) and boot from the same ISO. Of course GCC or LLVM produced better optimised code, but TCC, being so small runs so much faster.

notorandit 6y ago

It isn't as it compiles a subset of c. Nonetheless it's a gem!

wolf550e 6y ago

Suppose you want to defeat a "Reflections on Trusting Trust" attack and bootstrap a toolchain source code you believe is clean to produce binaries that are clean. You need to compile llvm/clang (or gcc). You start with something small you can audit manually, use it to build binaries that can compile llvm, then use llvm to build itself to get an optimized compiler that doesn't have malicious code to recognize the password check inside the login binary and emit machine code that is not faithful to the source code.

Drakim 6y ago
How do you know that your text editors aren't compiled to hide the payload when examining this compiler, thus perpetuating the hidenness?
- xmodem 6y ago
  If you wanted to solve for that, you would have to build a computer like the monster6502 [1] to run the compiler on, and visually inspect the memory contents. 1: https://monster6502.com/ https://monster6502.com/
  - MawKKe 6y ago
    How do you know the person who designed that isn't in on it?
    - archi42 6y ago
      The thing is pretty easy to verify. The ultimate question is: How far do you need to go until you believe that the earth is indeed not flat? Do you trust your teachers? Stand on a tall building? Take a balloon ride? A plane? A spaceship? Then still, at which point can you rule out that the earth just appears to be a ball due to some yet-to-be-explained phenomenon (gravitational anomaly?) but is indeed flat? (The correct answer of course is "turtles all the way down").
      - 6y ago

cb321 6y ago

Another practical application is using tinycc as a backend compiler for Nim [1]. I set up my nim.cfg to default to this for a rapid edit-compile-test cycle (usually under 250 millisec), with a quick define switch to move to gcc-optimized code. Similar is likely possible for other prog.langs that emit C. One helpful feature for the full round-trip to an executable file is a built-in object file linker. Also, libtcc can be used as a library to "compile a string" and then run it which is the JIT application mentioned elsewhere in this thread. [1] https://nim-lang.org https://nim-lang.org

caf 6y ago

Android once included a library "libacc", (the Android "Almost" C Compiler") which was based on the deobfuscated version of this. https://android.googlesource.com/platform/system/core/+/eclair-release/libacc/acc.cpp https://android.googlesource.com/platform/system/core/+/ecla...