31–40 of 48 posts
> When I find a bug in this compiler, I go back to the original commit that introduced the bug and rewrite the commit history as if there were no such bug from the beginning. This is an unusual way of fixing bugs, but as a a part of a book, it is important to keep every commit bug-free.
Ooo la la! "Chibicc Vol. II, The Bugs" !?
In all seriousness, a book about the bugs would be (IMO) even more fun to read than the compiler book.
Oh man I used to be a die hard fan of the author's 'turing complete fm[1]' podcast. It seems like he has stopped publishing new episodes, wonder what happened. [1] https://turingcomplete.fm/
Outstanding. A professional C compiler with a hackable codebase that emits x86_64 code. I'm noticing it assumes glibc-based linux. What if I modified it to emit Actually Portable Executables without needing ld/as?
This looks great, I’ll definitely use it. Is there any similar project like this where LLVM IR is used? I’ll start building a language just for fun during weekends and I plan to use LLVM but it is rather hard to understand clang on limited time, so a smaller scale project would be awesome.
When it comes to both parsing and emitting IR, keep it simple (stupid!) - the difficult bit (on a day to day basis) with the compiler is almost always the language semantics, the backend is more theory-dense but to just implement a language you can use LLVM as a black-box.
If you minimise mutable state and utilise lowering (you can implement foreach by lowering the AST to a for loop, for example) your compiler will be much easier to debug.
Can it compile itself ?
Yes, it is.
It would be helpful if the title was edited to feature the compiler's name: chibicc. It would make it easier to search and SEO-wise it would be helpful to disseminate the project.
Send an email to the mods hn@ycombinator.com They sometimes makes these changes.
Another small C compiler by the same author: https://github.com/rui314/8cc
https://bellard.org/tcc/ Probably best know and with loooong beard...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small-C This is what I think of when I see Small C as a proper noun.
This generation, CPM support and everything: https://archive.org/details/dr_dobbs_journal_vol_09/page/n33...
It would be helpful if the title was edited to feature the compiler's name: chibicc. It would make it easier to search and SEO-wise it would be helpful to disseminate the project.