[TUHS] Off topic: Does anyone know what's going on with the PCC Revived project?

[TUHS] Off topic: Does anyone know what's going on with the PCC Revived project?

[Aharon Robbins]

I'm hoping that someone hear (*BSD folks?) might know what's happened
with the PCC Revived project. The site and CVS server for it went
offline in October 2023 or so, and I lost the email address for
Ragge who was doing it.

Thanks,

Arnold

[TUHS] Re: Off topic: Does anyone know what's going on with the PCC Revived project?

[Luther Johnson]

I think LCC might be something of interest, if you haven't looked into 
it yet, and there is a nice Windows version, called Pelle's C, that 
originated from it.

https://github.com/drh/lcc

http://www.smorgasbordet.com/pellesc/

On 05/23/2025 09:13 AM, Dan Cross wrote:
> On Fri, May 23, 2025 at 8:56 AM Steve Nickolas <usotsuki@buric.co> wrote:
>> On Fri, 23 May 2025, Steffen Nurpmeso wrote:
>>> It is *such* a pity!  I said similar sad words just two days ago
>>> when shortly touching linux-man@.  That we lost (i only track your
>>> git mirror of) it, and are left with only gigabyte monsters that
>>> go universes beyond Ken Thompson's "reasonable optimizations"
>>> (iirc), and tcc (luckily this we have).  Here the built gcc ball
>>> is 243 times larger than tcc's, and clang is 284 times larger
>>> even!
>> I wish I had any idea what I was doing when it came to language
>> interpreters and compilers... These swiss-army-nukes epitomize "no kill
>> like overkill", but I prefer small, single-purpose tools.
>>
>> A new lightweight C compiler with a focus on various varieties of x86 is
>> something I think would be useful and would do if I had any idea how to go
>> about it.
> Well, there's https://github.com/rui314/chibicc, which is pretty small
> and seems decent (caveat that I haven't used it, though).
>
>          - Dadn C.
>

[TUHS] Re: Off topic: Does anyone know what's going on with the PCC Revived project?

[Steffen Nurpmeso]

Steve Nickolas wrote in
 <alpine.DEB.2.21.2505230843170.7423@sd-119843.dedibox.fr>:
 |On Fri, 23 May 2025, Steffen Nurpmeso wrote:
 |> It is *such* a pity!  I said similar sad words just two days ago
 |> when shortly touching linux-man@.  That we lost (i only track your
 |> git mirror of) it, and are left with only gigabyte monsters that
 |> go universes beyond Ken Thompson's "reasonable optimizations"
 |> (iirc), and tcc (luckily this we have).  Here the built gcc ball
 |> is 243 times larger than tcc's, and clang is 284 times larger
 |> even!
 |
 |I wish I had any idea what I was doing when it came to language 
 |interpreters and compilers... These swiss-army-nukes epitomize "no kill 
 |like overkill", but I prefer small, single-purpose tools.
 |
 |A new lightweight C compiler with a focus on various varieties of x86 is 
 |something I think would be useful and would do if I had any idea how to go 
 |about it.

I never did a C compiler myself.  It .. you know, i read Knuth's
TeXbook i think there it is, and, if i recall this correctly (~25
years), there is a homework item "write an operating system".
I think this is hm spiritually interesting, in that you do not
have that many opportunities really.  Some people get mortally
ill, survive it, and things changed.  Maybe something other
horrible like the "famous" crash [1] make you turn around.  Maybe
an operating system is an easy thing for homework when you are 18
(even more so around Y2K, *possibly*), but for an elder it is
clear that things turn out to be more complicated than thought
first.  (In that spirit one may also remember Tso's narrative on
Ext* and BTRFS as seen on this list.  And i think this very topic
here was also on the table already.)
There is also neatcc by Iranian human Ali Gholami Rudi[2] that
i never really used myself:

  It supports a large subset of
  ANSI C but lacks some of its features, the most important of which are
  struct bitfields, inline assembly, and floating point types.

But the thing with pcc, beside its very long history, is that it
is an optimizing compiler that compiles pretty fast.  And it also
produced warnings pretty well.  The entire git repo is 2.3MB.
This is even smaller than tcc's, which is even faster, but does
not optimize at all.
Compile speed during development matters for me.  It is not as bad
as say 20 years ago, i now have four cores and lots of RAM, and
NVME (that I/O performance makes me happy over and over again, it
was unthinkable in the past).

  [1] https://www.corvetteforum.com/articles/corvette-z06-owner-survives-horrific-crash-on-the-405-in-california/
  [2] https://github.com/aligrudi/neatcc

So for me, whereas i wish i would have more time for programming,
it surely would not be a compiler, but more MUA and roff.

The thing is also, you know, that the language development really
distracts me more and more.  This is not "my C" anymore, and it
long is not the C++ i spent so much time in.  (It never was the
way i would loved to have, but creating an entire language
environment is even more impossible; like QT, a preprocessor
maybe, but ... then not.)  And perl obsoleted goto at times.
Ie, i was informed on the linux-man thing i mentioned that C may
get forward declarations for parameters (see [3]), like so:

       size_t mbrtowc(size_t n;
                      wchar_t *restrict pwc, const char s[restrict n],
                      size_t n, mbstate_t *restrict ps);

whereas i am used to

    size_t mbrtowc(wchar_t *restrict pwc, const char *restrict s,
      size_t n, mbstate_t *restrict ps);

though in fact scratch that "restrict" that i never used and
dislike.  Or that i have to turn to memmove more and more because
memcpy now "asserts" any overlap, regardless of the direction, and
regardless the fact that memory utility implementations of memmove
simply start at the end instead of the begin on overlap.
Regardless of non-temporal moves, and whatever hardware
optimization there is.  Because there is no language-side
possibility to express the situation, you have to use the library
function memmove not memcpy, for nothing.  And more such.
Whatever, and all off-topic.

  [3] https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg14/www/docs/n3433.pdf

 --End of <alpine.DEB.2.21.2505230843170.7423@sd-119843.dedibox.fr>

--steffen
|
|Der Kragenbaer,                The moon bear,
|der holt sich munter           he cheerfully and one by one
|einen nach dem anderen runter  wa.ks himself off
|(By Robert Gernhardt)

[TUHS] Re: Off topic: Does anyone know what's going on with the PCC Revived project?

[arnold]

Thanks. LCC is only for 32 bit x86 (unless something changed very
recently). And a Windows compiler doesn't help me. :-)

Arnold

Luther Johnson <luther.johnson@makerlisp.com> wrote:

> I think LCC might be something of interest, if you haven't looked into 
> it yet, and there is a nice Windows version, called Pelle's C, that 
> originated from it.
>
> https://github.com/drh/lcc
>
> http://www.smorgasbordet.com/pellesc/
>
> On 05/23/2025 09:13 AM, Dan Cross wrote:
> > On Fri, May 23, 2025 at 8:56 AM Steve Nickolas <usotsuki@buric.co> wrote:
> >> On Fri, 23 May 2025, Steffen Nurpmeso wrote:
> >>> It is *such* a pity!  I said similar sad words just two days ago
> >>> when shortly touching linux-man@.  That we lost (i only track your
> >>> git mirror of) it, and are left with only gigabyte monsters that
> >>> go universes beyond Ken Thompson's "reasonable optimizations"
> >>> (iirc), and tcc (luckily this we have).  Here the built gcc ball
> >>> is 243 times larger than tcc's, and clang is 284 times larger
> >>> even!
> >> I wish I had any idea what I was doing when it came to language
> >> interpreters and compilers... These swiss-army-nukes epitomize "no kill
> >> like overkill", but I prefer small, single-purpose tools.
> >>
> >> A new lightweight C compiler with a focus on various varieties of x86 is
> >> something I think would be useful and would do if I had any idea how to go
> >> about it.
> > Well, there's https://github.com/rui314/chibicc, which is pretty small
> > and seems decent (caveat that I haven't used it, though).
> >
> >          - Dadn C.
> >
>

[TUHS] Re: Off topic: Does anyone know what's going on with the PCC Revived project?

[arnold]

Also, the dickman pcc doesn't have the pcc-libs directory, which
is also needed.

"Greg A. Woods" <woods@robohack.ca> wrote:

> At Fri, 23 May 2025 14:39:03 +0200, Arno Griffioen via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org> wrote:
> Subject: [TUHS] Re: Off topic: Does anyone know what's going on with the PCC Revived project?
> >
> > On Fri, May 23, 2025 at 02:27:20PM +0300, Aharon Robbins wrote:
> > > I'm hoping that someone hear (*BSD folks?) might know what's happened
> > > with the PCC Revived project. The site and CVS server for it went
> > > offline in October 2023 or so, and I lost the email address for
> > > Ragge who was doing it.
> >
> > Don't know the status of the PCC-Revived project, but Anders Magnusson
> > <ragge@tethuvudet.se> is still active now and again on the NetBSD/VAX
> > mailing list.
>
> In recent (March 26) private email Anders told me that indeed the CVS
> repository went unreachable because the machine it was hosted on was
> shut down.
>
> He said he has a plan to move it to https://github.com/PortableCC and
> that there are some pending fixes for it but that he hasn't had time to
> make the move yet.
>
> I asked him about the Git import at https://github.com/didickman/pcc and
> he said that looks like a good version to reference for now.  That
> repository seems to me to be a faithful conversion of the original CVS
> repository.  It has a DATESTAMP of 20230830 (which is ~7.5 years ahead
> of the version that was imported into, and is still in, the NetBSD
> source tree).
>
> --
> 					Greg A. Woods <gwoods@acm.org>
>
> Kelowna, BC     +1 250 762-7675           RoboHack <woods@robohack.ca>
> Planix, Inc. <woods@planix.com>     Avoncote Farms <woods@avoncote.ca>

[TUHS] Re: Off topic: Does anyone know what's going on with the PCC Revived project?

[Luther Johnson]

Besides which x86 or other machine models you want, and how much of 
which sort of optimization is enough, the other challenge is which C 
language variant, exactly, you want. Simple C compilers that do one 
thing well, often, well, do just one of these things.

On 05/25/2025 04:46 PM, Bakul Shah via TUHS wrote:
> In May 23, 2025, at 5:45 AM, Steve Nickolas <usotsuki@buric.co> wrote:
>> On Fri, 23 May 2025, Steffen Nurpmeso wrote:
>>
>>> It is *such* a pity!  I said similar sad words just two days ago
>>> when shortly touching linux-man@.  That we lost (i only track your
>>> git mirror of) it, and are left with only gigabyte monsters that
>>> go universes beyond Ken Thompson's "reasonable optimizations"
>>> (iirc), and tcc (luckily this we have).  Here the built gcc ball
>>> is 243 times larger than tcc's, and clang is 284 times larger
>>> even!
>> I wish I had any idea what I was doing when it came to language interpreters and compilers... These swiss-army-nukes epitomize "no kill like overkill", but I prefer small, single-purpose tools.
>>
>> A new lightweight C compiler with a focus on various varieties of x86 is something I think would be useful and would do if I had any idea how to go about it.
> There are a number of such efforts. Apart from the ones
> already mentioned, there are at least
>    https://git.sr.ht/~mcf/cproc & https://www.simple-cc.org/
> May be you can help them out....
>
> The difficulty is in maintaining such compilers, standard
> compliance, complete toolchains for supported platforms, other
> support programs, dealing with platform changes etc.
>
> Machines are fast enough (for me) and I would love it if I
> can compile the (FreeBSD) kernel + most of the userland using
> a fast & simple compiler but that is just not possible as
> some compiler specific dependencies have slowly crept in
> standard header files.
>
>

[TUHS] Re: Off topic: Does anyone know what's going on with the PCC Revived project?

[arnold]

Bakul Shah via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org> wrote:

> There are a number of such efforts. Apart from the ones
> already mentioned, there are at least
>   https://git.sr.ht/~mcf/cproc & https://www.simple-cc.org/

On Ubuntu 24.0, neither of these gets through gawk's configure
script, although they both compile hello world. Sigh.

Thanks for the pointers though.

Arnold

[TUHS] Re: Off topic: Does anyone know what's going on with the PCC Revived project?

[Roberto E. Vargas Caballero]

Hi,

On Sun, May 25, 2025 at 04:46:10PM -0700, Bakul Shah via TUHS wrote:
> There are a number of such efforts. Apart from the ones
> already mentioned, there are at least
>   https://git.sr.ht/~mcf/cproc & https://www.simple-cc.org/
> May be you can help them out....

The author of simple-cc here. I would say that cproc is a very good
state and it is able to compile many, many things because it
implemented C11 and many c23 features and a small subset of GNU
extensions that (sadly) are used by many projects today.
The case of simple-cc is different, because it is a more ambitious
project and it implements a full toolchain, including things like
nm, size, as, ... and even a tiny libc. It means that the work is
more disperse between the different tools and the compiler itself
targets only C99 and lacks many features of it (yet).

> The difficulty is in maintaining such compilers, standard
> compliance, complete toolchains for supported platforms, other
> support programs, dealing with platform changes etc.

Indeed. Recently the support for OpenBSD was broken because they
introduced https://man.openbsd.org/pinsyscalls.2 .

Regards,