[Tinycc-devel] Re: difference between gcc & tcc

[Neil Booth]

> tcc:
[...]
> + compatybility with standards

This is not true at all.  TCC is not close to being compliant to
even C89; it misses out almost all of the hard things (e.g. trigraphs
and correct macro expansion to name but two in the preprocessor), and
fails to diagnose an enormous range of things the standard requires
be diagnosed.  This is what helps it be so fast.

Unfortunately it does seem to be believed by many - witness
several cases of TCC and GCC doing things differently being dismissed
as TCC being stricter than GCC in the mail archives.  In all cases
I remember it is actually a TCC bug.

> + portabilyty (easy to adapt to some new system/hardware)

Really this isn't true beyond a superficial level either - e.g. where
are the abstractions for target floating point and integer issues that
would be needed in the front end?  Calculations are done by tcc in
host arithmetic, which is doomed for a portable cross compiler.

Neil.