You missed the point too [LWN.net]

You missed the point too

Posted Mar 27, 2008 2:31 UTC (Thu) by sylware (subscriber, #35259)
In reply to: You missed the point by elanthis
Parent article: Striking gold in binutils

If I need to rewrite from scratch a non optimizing C compiler it's easy. Look at tcc, and I
have plenty of students who had the "small and simple" project of writing a C compiler. Of
course, when we bring C++ on the table, you hear "insane", "crazy", "far to complex" etc... I
was refering to *that* complexity, not the current complexity of the best utra-super
optimizing compiler which is gcc.

(Log in to post comments)

You missed the point too

Posted Mar 27, 2008 11:04 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

But a random C compiler reimplementation isn't capable of compiling most of the other parts of
the stack in any case. GCC can be compiled with just about anything that supports ISO C, but
you'll need to reproduce a lot of GCC's (largely undocumented) foibles and language extensions
before you can compile, say, the Linux kernel with it.

I don't really see why the complexity of the *compiler* is relevant anyway. It's not as if GCC
is going to abruptly go away or stop working, so its complexity doesn't negatively impact you
at all.

You missed the point too

Posted Mar 28, 2008 17:20 UTC (Fri) by landley (subscriber, #6789) [Link]

Actually, I'm working on making tinycc (a project derived from tcc) compile the rest of the
stack, including the kernel.  I have rather a lot of work left to do, of course. :)

http://landley.net/code/tinycc

I find gold interesting, but not useful in my case because tinycc's linker is built-in.  (I'm
reorganizing the code to work as a "swiss army knife" executable ala busybox, but that's not
in -pre2.  Maybe -pre3.)

As for the kernel, the linux-tiny project is working on getting that more modular so we need
to select less of it...

Rob