Item — HN Reader

There a couple of open source C compilers TCC, SDCC, tendra, chibicc, ACK, LCC, PCC, etc. and also many commercial ones.

It is true that GCC is not written in C anymore, but it is easy to see that the code is still relatively close. I am also myself writing a C compiler in C at the moment and there is no problem at all.

1 comments

How many of those are actually shipping software into production?

Quite curious about which commercial C compilers, written in C, are being sold, keeping those companies in business.

Every year thousands of CS students write toy C compilers.

It will be hard to agree with you what "production" even means. I have written and shipped at least one compiler/interpreter (written in plain C). The language wasn't an issue at all. (This compiler doesn't have any meaningful optimizations, but I don't see why that should change the game).

GCC and Clang aren't "sold" either, nor is MSVC really.

I have never contributed to GCC, but as a fact I have visited plenty of files from its source code, and so far haven't encountered any meaningful use of C++ that couldn't easily be rewritten in plain C. The overwhelming majority of the code would probably compile as C without changes.

I'm sure that there are far more meaningful "problems" with the architecture of a compiler written in C that are not the implementation language. For example, GCC is a pain to build (IIRC when I tried many years ago, I gave up).