GNU Mes replacement

The goal of this project is to simplify stage0 of live-bootstrap, which involves implementing a replacement for the GNU Mes compiler by implementing a C-compiler in C that can compile the Tiny C Compiler version 0.9.26.

The motivation for this project is given in the presentation Reviewing live-bootstrap.

For blog article related to reviewing the live bootstrap project and this project see the section ‘Live-bootstrap’ on this page.

Stage 1

The first stage of this project is to implement said C-compiler for i386. The source of the C-compiler is the file tcc_cc.c. This compiler produces intermediate code in a stack based language. The intermediage code can be compiled with the program stack_c.c to assembly or interpretted with the program stack_c_interpreter.c

This stage depends on a number of executables from stage0. Namely:

• hex2
• M1
• blood-elf
• catm
• match
• sha256sum These need to be present in the directory of the repository.

Furthermore it requires the usual Linux commands and the GNU C compiler. A makefile is included to build and test the C-compiler tcc_cc.

The sources of the Tiny C Compiler should be placed in a directory with the name tcc_sources that should also have sub directory lib.

There should also be a directory mes with the contents of the GNU Mes compiler, which is needed to build the standard library that the Tiny C Compiler needs.

To build and test the Tiny C Compiler, the test.sh shell script is provided. This script first compiles the Tiny C Compiler with GNU C-compiler, resulting in tcc_g and with tcc_cc compiler, resulting in tcc_s. Next is uses these to bootstrap the Tiny C Compiler from the sources. The script compares the results for the various steps using tcc_g and tcc_c.

Remark: The test.sh script assumes that this repository is cloned in the git directory in the home directory. Please update the BINDIR to point to the repository containing the repository.

Stage 2

The second stage will focus on removing the dependency of the executables from stage0 by building these with the C-compiler.

Older files

For a first feasability study to analyzing what part of the C-grammar that is needed for compiling TCC. For this I wrote a minimal C preprocessor: min_tcc_preprocessor.cpp and CParser.c that is heavily based on RawParser.

Acknowledgments

The work in this repository falls under the project Verifying and documenting live-bootstrap, which was funded through the NGI0 Core Fund, a fund established by NLnet with financial support from the European Commission’s Next Generation Internet programme, under the aegis of DG Communications Networks, Content and Technology under grant agreement Nₒ 101092990.