In An Era Of Clang, Portable C Compiler Isn't Beloved
Phoronix: In An Era Of Clang, Portable C Compiler Isn't Beloved
It's going on two years since the release of PCC 1.0, but there hasn't been any follow-on Portable C Compiler release nor is there much public-facing development activity happening...
First, PCC currently is versioned 1.1.0.DEVEL.
Second, it targets GCC 4.3.1 compatability.
Third, there was talk about a release "after Christmas", but nothing's come of that yet. There's also talk about adding uclibc support.
Some interesting tidbits:
-Several of the recent commits fixed bugs found attempting to compile musl; musl does work with gcc, pcc, or clang as compiler.
-PCC can be compiled with binutils/gas or yasm (aimed at mingw support, but semi-functional on Linux/x86) for assembler; in the latter case, one might drop in mclinker and get a functional toolchain.
-For those who don't know, pcc is a direct descendent of the second C compiler from AT&T, which shipped with 7th Edition Unix; the original pcc was the first C compiler to be readily retargetted and use yacc.
-The main reason for using pcc is faster compilation with less memory needed to compile software; I've compiled musl on rather pathetic hardware with pcc, and the compile time made gcc3 look bad.
There is no C++ support; while long-term plans aim for that, code is barely started. Of course, PCC is primarily a C compiler.
In An Era Of Clang, Portable C Compiler Isn't Beloved
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