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Comment by jpfr | Hacker News Reader

Development is still going strong.

This is the active code repository of TCC: http://repo.or.cz/w/tinycc.git

Yup! I maintain a (very rough and in-progress) fork of that code for supporting iOS: https://github.com/saagarjha/tinycc

Sounds cool! What parts is it supposed to support?

- Mach-O binaries?

- ARM?

- Objective-C?

- ?

Just ARM for now, and support for certain memory protection restrictions that iOS imposes. Honestly, I really didn't do much other than tweak the Makefile, modifying a call to mprotect, and rearrange some deallocation code. TCC doesn't support Mach-O yet, and that's not something that I have enough expertise to support, so all execution is done by JITing an ELF binary in memory as it's done on macOS.

Neat project!

Is it just for fun, or could it be 'useful'? iOS categorically prohibits JIT, right?

It’s just for fun right now, but I have an idea for something that uses this that’s currently blocked by a stupid, unrelated issue. And yes, iOS generally prohibits JIT, but there are certain circumstances under which you can perform it (you need a certain entitlement). There’s no way that I’m aware to get an app through App Store review with this functionality, though.

Indeed. If it were possible, Firefox would have done it.

Cool! With CocoaPods building everything from source, a fast compiler would be a godsend for most iOS shops, even for just debug builds.

It should be pretty easy to add Objective-C and C++ support, right? ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

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