pcc has been making good progress [LWN.net]

pcc has been making good progress

Posted Nov 17, 2008 21:57 UTC (Mon) by roskegg (subscriber, #105)
Parent article: pcc seeks contributions to reach 1.0 milestone

I've been watching the commits to the pcc tree, and am really impressed at the progress it is making. It really is fitting the bill of small, clean, fast, portable. Just recently support for inline functions was added.

The pcc project is small enough that a regular guy can wrap his head around it, whereas gcc takes a lot of effort.

Ragge deserves our support, and we can only benefit from pcc become better. It is already usable.

Someone here said pcc suffers from ancient bad design decisions. What would those be? The codebase is almost entirely new, very little of the original code remains.

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pcc has been making good progress

Posted Nov 18, 2008 0:53 UTC (Tue) by robert_s (subscriber, #42402) [Link]

"Someone here said pcc suffers from ancient bad design decisions. What would those be? The codebase is almost entirely new, very little of the original code remains."

Exactly - so they're essentially scratchwriting a compiler, it's just everyone's afraid of saying that for some reason. Perhaps because it betrays the mammoth nature of the task.

pcc has been making good progress

Posted Nov 19, 2008 8:36 UTC (Wed) by ragge (guest, #55254) [Link]

Well, there were some maybe not so good design decisions in the compiler, but those that matters has been corrected. Hey, it's a small compiler, not so difficult to fix things :-)