Re: tcc

Yodel!

On Friday 13 March 2009 10:28:08 Giacomo A. Catenazzi wrote:
> Adam Borowski wrote:
> > On Wed, Mar 11, 2009 at 11:21:08PM +0100, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote:

> >> A C source file by itself cannot be run
> >> without having been compiled
> > 
> > I guess you haven't seen the Real Men's only true scripting language.
> > 
> > apt-get install tcc
...
> It is not real C  ;-)
> 
> few assumptions on compiled language doesn't allow you to
> interpret a compiled language (and usually also the contrary).
> Few programs use such assumptions, but anyway...

While I agree that modern (dynamically typed etc.) scripting languages 
cannot easily be compiled (note that this is only a practical difference, 
not a theoretical one), I fail to see the difficulty with executing C from 
an interpreter.  In fact C makes quite few assumptions about the runtime 
environment and doesn't expect much/any behind the scenes magic to happen.  
I bet a C interpreter could even be written so that it only uses memory when 
the C source also would allocate memory (entering a stack frame and malloc)
[1], so while the interpreted program would probably hit OOM earlier then 
the compiled one, it would still do so only at the same places that a 
compiled program might hit OOM.

[1] One obvious way is to parse a whole function on entering it.  Given the 
low complexity of plain C code, it can then be executed without allocating 
further memory by just jumping around in the parse tree.

cheers
-- vbi


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