"i tend to think tinycc may not be the playground for it"
Is TCC a personal "playground" or a C compiler that could (should) be
considered capable ?
All I see is people saying that TCC feature set should (must) only cover what
they need out of it ("it's good enough for me").
The C standard has been bastardized enough during its lifespan, why not
selecting one version (c99, c11) and make it feature complete once and for all ?
It's tiresome to see people arguing how not to implement this functionality or
that support, taming down willing enthusiasts.
No wonder why TCC is still at 0.9.27 after so long, nobody wanting to take it
seriously as a capable yet lightweight C compiler contender.
We've seen some BSD patches recently, some breaking things, some fixing things,
__Complex has been an issue for a while now (some libraries need it
nonetheless).
Why should we always have to rely on "many other gigantic heavy-weight
toolchains" when it surely doesn't need "millions of lines of code which do
implement it" ?
Come on guys, make TCC great again, with each passing year it should implement
many new things and fix bugs, by now it should be "gcc or llvm/clang" at a
fraction of the size.
Is it ?
Regards.
----- Mail d'origine -----
De: Michael Ackermann via Tinycc-devel <[email protected]>
À: [email protected]
Cc: Michael Ackermann <[email protected]>
Envoyé: Thu, 13 Aug 2026 11:33:27 +0200 (CEST)
Objet: Re: [Tinycc-devel] ISOC99 _Complex
Hi,
i'll try to summarize a few notes concerning C99 _Complex first:
- with C11 it was designated an _optional_ core language feature again;
in principle i do feel _Complex is non-orthogonal to C-language at the
abstraction layer of C language
- of cause complex numbers are important, question is if those should become
a core language-feature of C itself hence
- there certainly are other options to implement complex numbers such as some
dedicated math-library (would be curious myself which those are);
and what would any benefit of _Complex be over any dedicated math library?
- another motivation to implement _Complex language extension regardless seems
musl-libc for example by default relies upon it, but this can easily be
patched without extending tinycc compiler and won't cause any trouble
anywhere then (i'm maintaining such a musl-libc and userspace fork here to
backport onto linux-tcc/musl for example, absense of _Complex was a
non-issue so far, and when complex numbers are required i would be curious
which math libraries existed to implement them where those belong)
- it's important to consider the trade-off between language features supported
and complexity of tinycc compiler; obviously tinycc is intended to be tiny
by design and i do not know how much _Complex extension would add to the belly
of tinycc (there is many other gigantic heavy-weight toolchains such as
gcc or llvm/clang with dozens of millions of lines of code which do implement
it)
Long story short, of cause _Complex implementation is an interesting topic,
given the importance of this with signal processing etc,
but i tend to think tinycc may not be the playground for it.
Hope i'm not in error with this judgement, feedback appreciated if any.
Michael
On 2026-08-12 21:51, [email protected] wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I was wondering if any has attempted or started to work out
> implementing _Complex?
>
> If not I would like to attempt it ??
>
>
> Thanks,
>
>
> Jordan
> _______________________________________________
> Tinycc-devel mailing list
> [email protected]
> https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/tinycc-devel
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