[archimedespi]

tcc is blazingly fast, at least last time i used it. it's honestly fast enough that you could probably use it as an c interpreter

[buserror]

I do use it as interpreter on embedded boards! Preprocess/trim the headers you need, and add #!/bin/tcc -run at the top of your .C file, add a +x to it and it'll run just fine!

I love tcc, in fact I added a firmware instruction translator to 'JIT' AVR code to simavr a few weeks ago. Takes a AVR binary, translates it to C, and compiles it on the fly with libtcc to run it :-)

https://github.com/buserror/simavr/tree/jit-wip

[juliangoldsmith]

>I love tcc, in fact I added a firmware instruction translator to 'JIT' AVR code to simavr a few weeks ago. Takes a AVR binary, translates it to C, and compiles it on the fly with libtcc to run it :-)

That is unholy, and glorious.

[buserror]

Ahah, thanks for that -- I thought it was pretty clever, but it's hard to explain why to someone :-)

If you look closer, you can see I've actually repurposed the main interpreter core, and uses a GNU awk (of all thing) to extract each opcode emulation 'meat', converts it to a string to and that string is used by the translator to generate the C for tcc...

[Hydraulix989]

Any technical reasons in particular? I'm curious.

How many passes is it doing? I suspect they aren't doing much optimization then? Maybe they patch in differences in the ASTs at the IR level and work from there?

[smitherfield]

My understanding is TCC does little to no optimization; it's intended to be used for bootstrapping.