Re: Alternative compilers to GCC/Clang

[Amy Parker]

On Mon, Feb 1, 2021 at 9:33 PM Willy Tarreau <w@xxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Hi Amy,
>
> On Mon, Feb 01, 2021 at 03:31:49PM -0800, Amy Parker wrote:
> > Hello! My name's Amy. I'm really impressed by the work done to make
> > Clang (and the LLVM toolchain overall) able to compile the kernel.
> > Figured I might as well donate my monkey hours to helping make it run
> > on other compilers as well. I haven't been able to find any that use
> > the same arguments structure as GCC and Clang (read: you can pass it
> > in as CC=compilername in your $MAKEOPTS). Any compilers along that
> > route anyone here has worked with that I could work with?
>
> If you're interested, you should have a look at TCC (tiny CC) :
>
>      https://repo.or.cz/tinycc.git

Thank you for linking this! Wasn't able to find this git repository
for it - only binaries for nonfree operating systems (yuck).

>
> It compiles extremely fast, implements some subsets of gcc (a few
> attributes for example), but is far from being able to compile a kernel

Well, we'll see what I can do with that. :)

> (at least last time I checked). Its speed makes it very convenient for
> development. I made some efforts to make haproxy support it (and provided
> some fixes to tcc) as it compiles the whole project in 0.5 second instead
> of ~10 seconds with a modern gcc. It could probably compile a kernel in
> 15-20 seconds if properly supported, and this could be particularly handy
> for development and testing.

Oh wow, yeah, that would be great. Thank you for pointing this out!
Compiling the kernel in 15-20 seconds instead of the current *couple
minutes* would definitely be great.

>
> Regards,
> Willy

Best regards,
Amy Parker
(she/her/hers)