On Tuesday 28 August 2007 1:14:19 am Peter Lund wrote: > > How about not having that many tests? > > Certainly the option I would prefer. I don't see tcc as having nearly > as many external dependencies as my project had.
I don't know if this was one of Fabrice's design goals, but it's certainly one of mine. Some day I'd like to get a self-bootstrapping system with just four packages: uClibc BusyBox (or ToyBox) linux tcc I want to boot that under qemu and have it rebuild itself from source code, and boot _that_. > > I actually think the _easy_ way to > > handle this is to generate all cross compilers by default and then > > have a > > small shell script create a symlink to the one that produces output > > for our > > host platform (if any). > > I would like that :) I'm kind of opinionated about how a compiler works. I think it's no different from a docbook to pdf converter: it takes input and produces output. If something like xml2 had extensive special cases and configuration for every host machine it ran on, it would be a deeply broken piece of software. Yes, having different _targets_ is an interesting thing to configure, because the program is producing different output formats. But that's unrelated to what host you run it on and NOT YOUR PROBLEM. "On arm my xml2 produces html, and on PPC it produces pdf, and on mips it produces .PNG files!" What's wrong with this picture? Different behavior on different hosts is bad coding. Cross compiling is NOT SPECIAL. The machine your compiler runs on is none of your business, it's the problem of the host compiler you get built with, which is a separate piece of software and should already know everything interesting about your host platform. (If you try to configure your software to work on a host OTHER than the one the compiler that's building you is producing an executable for, it won't work anyway. It doesn't matter if it's a compiler or a web browser or what: it won't work. So don't go there.) If the output you produce happens to be an executable capable of running on the current platform, this is a happy coincidence. But it's also not unique to a compiler: a sed invocation can produce a shell script. Not brain surgery, and not worth jumping through extensive hoops at every level of the program to double-check. </rant> I still have to implement this, of course. (Fabrice didn't fall far into the trap of thinking the host is important, but it's tangled in more than one place and I need to get around to cleaning it out...) Rob -- "One of my most productive days was throwing away 1000 lines of code." - Ken Thompson. _______________________________________________ Tinycc-devel mailing list Tinycc-devel@nongnu.org http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/tinycc-devel
