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Comment by fizixer | Hacker News Reader

musl is great, but it would great if there was something at the compiler level that is better than both gcc and LLVM/Clang.

LLVM/Clang is a step in the right direction but it's quite bloated because of support for C++, Objective-C etc (for C standards at least); not to mention it's written in C++.

Being a Python/C hybrid enthusiast, I looked into taking something like Eli Bendersky's pycparser and making it featureful (preprocesser parsing at the minimum), but haven't done anything in that direction. Maybe some way of combining pycparser and tcc.

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What's wrong with being written in C++? It's a high-level, fast language with higher-level abstractions and better typesafety than C and decades of expertise built up around it.

Sure, that means it has some legacy bits that need to be supported, but to some degree that's the price of having a mature codebase.

Having compiled LLVM and rooted through its internals trying to implement a plugin, it looks pretty well-architected and internally consistent. Codebases that cover as much as LLVM+Clang do being that clean is a rare sight, IMO. And it's not slow.

> What's wrong with being written in C++?

Many C devs love to hate C++. I guess is something like some C++ devs love to hate Java. It's a bit of a heritage issue :)

C++ does the job for me... it's is almost as powerful as it is complicated but I find that a fair trade off (YMMV)

Actually, I love C, C++ and Java all the same. They are great tools for writing great code. But regarding the comments I've stumbled upon, I think you're right.

Nothing wrong with C++ per se, if you're a C++ programmer.

First, I assume this is a musl thread, so I'm assuming C++ people might not be interested in it in the first place (I'd be surprised if C++ communities discuss the bloat of glibc let alone seeking its minimal C alternatives like musl instead of going for C++ solutions like boost and what not).

Second, having hung around people who discuss the bloat of glibc, and strive for white-box and minimalism, of which musl is a result (this includes, but not limited to, communities like suckless, and cat-v.org), speaking of musl and clang in the same line would be odd at the least, considering clang is ~600k+ lines of C/C++, when there is a C-only tcc compiler at ~60k+, so it's likely clang is doing something (a lot of things) that C programmers have no interest in.

Although I should admit these minimalist C communities might not have a good opinion of Python either (that's one of my personal interests).

Part of those 600k lines of code come in the form of various things that tcc doesn't do -- things like loop unrolling, support for SSE, support for architectures other than intel-based, support C11, etc. So, you end up with a compiler that is significantly slower and less useful than the clang suite. So while there are things the C community wouldn't support, like other languages, there are quite a few things that the C community would consider vital these days.

As a (mostly ignorable) sidenote, TCC does support a couple of non-intel ISAs. At least 4-5k LOC beween arm-gen.c and C67-gen.c, compiled from an IR https://github.com/LuaDist/tcc/blob/master/il-opcodes.h If this repository's anything to go by: https://github.com/LuaDist/tcc

I'm not sure how well maintained those backends are, and I've read TCC isn't really stable enough to use in production, between the incomplete x64 backend and just general bugs... Solving those may yet push TCC a fair bit beyond 60k LOC.

Clang itself is ~400k once you exclude things like the static analyzer and all the various tooling built on top of it that's shipped with clang. Either way, that number is sort of a drop in the bucket compared to LLVM. LLVM is millions of lines of code, very little of which could be dropped simply by only supporting C. Even a C-only programmer wants things like optimization passes and backends for every platform they plan on running on.

That's one way to look at it. Another way to look at it is that Clang/LLVM are the open source compiler that aren't under the GPL and musl is the open source libc that isn't under the GPL.

There is pcc which looked like it had a chance for a while. There was at least a lot of excitement from the OpenBSD and NetBSD communities a while ago. I know it was imported but then I think it was removed. Development continues on but at a slower pace.

It is still in NetBSD but it still cannot compile the whole kernel so you need gcc too for now but there is support for a mixed build.

OpenBSD decided against it.

Have you tried using the plan 9 [from user space] c compiler?

I got lost in their naming convention, what is it, 2c? 8c? 9c?

The leading number just refers to the target architecture. 5x is arm32, 6x is x86_64 and 8x is x86_32.

It explains it in the man pages.

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