8cc is a small C compiler. It supports a broad range of C99 features, such as compound literals or designated initializers. Some GNU extensions, such as computed gotos, are also supported. 8cc is self-hosting, which means 8cc can compile itself.
8cc's source code is carefully written to be as concise and easy-to-read as possible, so that the source code will eventually be a good study material to learn various techniques used in compilers. You might find the lexer, the preprocessor and the parser are already useful to learn how C source code is processed at each stage.
It does not produce optimized assembly code; 8cc treats the CPU as a stack
machine. Local variables are always assigned on the stack. Operations in the
form of A = B op C are executed in the following way.
- Load B and C to registers
- Apply op to yield a result
- Write the results back to A's location
Producing optimized assembly is being planned.
Run make to build:
make
8cc comes with unit tests. To run the tests, give "test" as an argument:
make test
The following command compiles 8cc three times. The second generation binary and the third are self-compiled ones, and it's tested that they are identical. The unit tests are run for each generation of binaries.
make fulltest
8cc supports x86-64 Linux only. I'm using Ubuntu 11 as a development platform. It should work on other x86-64 Linux distributions.
Rui Ueyama [email protected]
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lcc: A Retargetable C Compiler: Design and Implementation http://www.amazon.com/dp/0805316701, https://github.com/drh/lcc
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TCC: Tiny C Compiler http://bellard.org/tcc/, http://repo.or.cz/w/tinycc.git/tree
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C99 standard final draft http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg14/www/docs/n1124.pdf
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C11 standard final draft http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg14/www/docs/n1570.pdf
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Dave Prosser's C Preprocessing Algorithm http://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20060626/
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x86-64 ABI http://www.x86-64.org/documentation/abi.pdf