The Portable C Compiler (PCC) Continues To Be Developed In 2016

When it comes to open-source C/C++ compilers, most of the coverage these days is about new features and functionality for GCC and LLVM Clang. However, the Portable C Compiler with its history originally dating back to the 1970s continues to be in-development.

It's been a while since last having anything to report on with the Portable C Compiler so I decided to do some Sunday night digging. Then again, PCC releases are far from frequent with PCC 1.0 coming in 2011 and PCC 1.1 having come at the end of 2014, after development on this compiler was restarted -- and largely rewritten -- beginning in 2007. PCC has been popular with the BSD distributions due to its BSD license and faster compile times than GCC, but in recent years much of the BSD developer interest appears to have shifted to Clang.

While fearing that PCC development had again stalled, fortunately, that isn't the case. PCC is still seeing new activity and a semi-active mailing list. In digging through the commits made to the Portable C Compiler since the 1.1 release at the end of 2014, highlights appear to include: updated Minix support, ARM and AMD64 support for Minix, PCC's CPP pre-processor now evaluates macros in a recursive manner that is much faster, C11 work, a two-pass build switch for compiling PCC's front-end and back-end as separate passes, updated MIPS support, and a variety of bug fixes.

That's what I dug up from some brief digging. The code can be browsed via FishEye. If you are interested in learning more about this BSD-licensed, cross-platform, portable C compiler, visit the project's web-site. Hopefully in 2016 we'll see more updates to report on for the Portable C Compiler.