> I finally learned C, and came to realize that there aren't actually any compilers that implement all of the C spec.

I think the main reason for this is that the C spec was always just an attempt to somewhat harmonize the already existing features of different C compilers, e.g. implementations come first and then after one or two decades, the C committee tries to standardize the features that have survived. That doesn't mean that all C compiler vendors immediatedly hop on board.

But then there's of course MSVC which after a few hopeful years of modernizing their C frontend now seems to have abandondend it again (I wonder though if MSVC as a whole has been abandondend looking at the abundance of red for MSVC in the C++23 and C++26 tables: https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/compiler_support.html)

While looking like a weird approach at first, it has definitely worked better than the C++ committee's approach to accept 'ideas' into the standard without even a proof-of-concept implementation - e.g. the one good thing about C++ is that it acts as a filter to stupid ideas before they can make it into C ;)

The first link is full of youthful anger (and a bit of cringe) not recognising the immense technical debt C is carrying. It is a 50 year old language written on a PDP.

For example the author rages about things like integer sizes, while every single serious C programmer does not use ambiguously sized types.

Sure, C has issues. A lot. But it is the cornerstone of our technological marvel. Everything around you runs C, everything in space runs C as well.

Do we have much better options for some applications nowadays ? Of course.

Will C go away ? No.

C has a lot of feature creep, and C++ is just C with extra feature creep.

The original C compiler ran on a PDP-11, which usually had just kilobytes of RAM. The syntax was written around compiling with such limited resources, hence the need for headers, primitives, semicolons, linkers, and so on.

It has changed a lot over time, but seems to be adding baggage, not removing it.

"Before this, I had thought that C was a simple language."

It was a simple language. It can still be used that way

As hobbyist I write simple programs that can be compiled with -std=c89

I use these programs every day. They are faster than their equivalents in python, smaller than their equivalents in go, and require less resources or dependencies to compile than their equivalents in rust

It is easy to take something simple and make it complex

Software developers do this consistently; software/language "by committee" faciltates it

Generally developers commenting publicly do not like "simple", they prefer "easy"

C89 is still useful and there are lots of things that rely on it

More real life C compilers is always a good thing. But remember: to be able to build a linux kernel, you will need zillions of gcc extensions... (I have a sweet spot for the alignment attribute of stack variables in printk).

That said, "C" (C99 with benign bits of c11 required for modern hardware programming) is only the "less worse" compromise for a computer language: its syntax is already way too rich (I let you think about the beyond sanity computer language syntax out there, yep... even for currently hyped ones).

For instance: C should have only one loop keyword loop{}, finally a real hard compile time constant definition, no integer promotion, no implicit cast (unless void* or some generic number literals), probably explicit static/dynamic casts (but certainly not with the c++ syntax), sized types should be primitives and not the other way around (s32,u32,f64...), no typedef/typeof/generic/etc, but should include inline support for modern hardware architecture programming aka memory barriers/"atomics"/explicit memory unaligned access, etc.

The benchmark is a small team of average devs should be able to develop a real-life compiler in reasonable amount of time.

Ofc, the more the merrier.

That is a myth often spread by folks that think K&R C book is everything there is to know, never opened the ISO C draft PDF, learned the differences between POSIX and standard library, tried to make their code portable outside GCC or nowadays clang, or even checked the extensions chapter on the compiler.

> [0]: https://faultlore.com/blah/c-isnt-a-language/#you-cant-actua...

This blog post is full of misconceptions.

It starts by asserting, that C defines an ABI and then complains that everything is so complicated, because actually C doesn't define it. C is defined in terms of behaviour of the abstract C machine. As far as C is concerned, there is no ABI. C only prescribes meaning to the language, it does not prescribe how you actually implement this; the compiler is free to do as it pleases, including choosing the ABI in some limits.

What defines the ABI is the platform consisting of the machine and the OS. The OS here includes at least the kernel (or some bare metal primitives) and the compiler. And the standard C library really IS part of the compiler. That's why GCC vs Clang or glibc vs muslc always comes with incompatibilities. Because these ARE different OSs. They can choose to do things the same, but this is because of some formal (POSIX, the platform vendor) or some informal (GCC and Clang) standards.

Yes a lot of ABIs are defined with C syntax, but this is, because C has terms for that and isn't too new. You can specify this in the language of your choice and it will describe the same ABI. Yes, int doesn't have a size independent of the platform. But if the specification wouldn't use C as a syntax, it would just write "this argument has the same size as described in the 'Appendix X Definitions' under 'Platform's default integer size'". Writing "int" is just a shorter notation for exactly this.

> You Can’t Actually Parse A C Header

I don't know why the choice to use the compiler to implement parsing a C header is framed as a bad thing. Is relying on write(2) from the kernel a bad thing instead of trying to bypass the kernel? The compiler is what defines the meaning of a header, why don't ask it about the result? If you don't feel like reimplementing the C preprocessor, you can also just parse preprocessed headers. These are self-contained, i.e. don't need knowing the include path. But of course this approach comes with the caveat that when the user updated the C compiler, your knowledge has become outdated or wrong. I don't know why it is framed as weird, that you need a C parser to parse C code. This is the definition of a C parser. You can't just write code that parses C and is somehow not a C parser.

> 176 triples. I was originally going to include them all for the visual gag/impact but it’s literally too many for even that.

No, they are ONLY 176 target triples (this is the LLVM term, other terms are "gnu tuple" or "gnu type") that your tool supports. There is also not the definite list, it's a syntax to describe the major components of a platform. There are decades of vendors improving their platform in incompatible ways, of course the description of this is messy.

See for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43698363

And this is the test data for the source of GNU types: https://cgit.git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/config.git/tree/tests... See that this contains 1180 types, but of course that's also not definite.

> pub type intmax_t = i64;

> A lot of code has completely given up on keeping C in the loop and has started hardcoding the definitions of core types. After all, they’re clearly just part of the platform’s ABI! What are they going to do, change the size of intmax_t!? That’s obviously an ABI-breaking change!

There is a reason it is called intMAX_t! It does not HAVE a definite size, it is the MAXimal size of an integer on that platform. Yes, they are problems nowadays due to ossification, but they come exactly from people like that blog author. When you want your program to have a stable ABI, that doesn't change when your platform supports larger integer types, you just don't use intMAX_t!

> And even then you have the x64 int problem: it’s such a fundamental type, and has been that size for so long, that countless applications may have weird undetectable assumptions about it. This is why int is 32-bit on x64 even though it was “supposed” to be 64-bit: int was 32-bit for so long that it was completely hopeless to update software to the new size even though it was a whole new architecture and target triple!

That is called ossification. When you program C you are not supposed to care about the sizes. When your program does, your program is broken/non-portable. Yes, this limits the compilers, because they don't want programs to be broken. But is really the same as e.g. MS Windows catering to a specific program's bugs. This is not a design mistake of C:

> sometimes you make a mistake so bad that you just don’t get to undo it.

A single-pass compiler is easier to implement in part because you're not going to do any of that optimization. You're writing a single-pass compiler either because you're banging out a quick sketch of an idea, and you don't care about production use, or because you've time-traveled back to the '70s or the '80s, where processors were so painfully slow and memory so eye-wateringly expensive that you might not even be able to read the entire source file into RAM at once, much less convert it all into some intermediate representation before starting to write out the machine code.

I think this might depend on the language you're writing in.

Historically, at least, it's pretty verbose to define a data type in Python compared to languages that are more designed for writing compilers. Consider these definitions from my prototype Bicicleta interpreter, which is written in ML, specifically OCaml:

    type methods = NoDefs
                               (* name, body, is_positional ... *)
                   | Definition of string * bicexpr * bool * methods
    and bicexpr = Name of string
                  | Call of bicexpr * string
                  | Literal of string option * methods
                  | Derivation of bicexpr * string option * methods
                  | StringConstant of string
                  | Integer of int
                  | Float of float
                  | NativeMethod of (lookup -> bicobj)

    let rec freevars = function
        Name n -> stringset [n]
      | Integer _ | StringConstant _ | Float _ -> stringset ["prog"]
      | NativeMethod _ -> stringset []
      | Literal (Some selfname, methods) -> 
            StringSet.diff (freevars_methods methods) (stringset [selfname])
      | Literal (None, methods) -> freevars_methods methods
      | Derivation(object_, self, methods) ->
            StringSet.union (freevars object_) (freevars (Literal(self, methods)))
      | Call(object_, _) -> freevars object_

Python does support pattern-matching now, so functions like this might not be any more verbose than the ML version if you program them the same way instead of in the OO fashion. I haven't tried using Python pattern-matching, so I don't really know.

In general, though, Python is more verbose than ML-family languages for this kind of thing by a factor of about 2–4, and that's before you count the test code you need in Python to get the kind of confidence in correctness that ML's type-checking gives you with no extra code. To my knowledge, Mypy doesn't do the kinds of pattern-matching-exhaustiveness checks that ML compilers do.

I've sometimes "cheated" by trying to write code like this in Python using regular tuples rather than named tuples. You can definitely make it work, but it's a real pain to debug.

Quoting Andy Chu from https://andychu.net/projects/:

> Python is not the right language for [implementing] languages. I will use OCaml for subsequent projects like this.

Python does have GC and dynamic dispatch, though, and those count for a lot.

C was designed to be compiled with a single-pass compiler.

Not sure if fewer LoC necessarily implies easier!

I think it depends on the language. I heard Turbo Pascal was pretty fast because 1) Pascal’s language features, 2) no optimization in TP 1.0 at least.

It's b/c when Chomsky invented the theory of formal grammars he was studying natural languages & the universality of abstract grammar¹. Computer scientists realized later that they could use the same theory as a foundation for formalizing the grammatical structures of programming languages.

¹https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chomsky_hierarchy

You should study C4, which is a C(subset) compiler in ~500 lines, but more interestingly, it can compile itself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8558822

Similar experience in DNA/genome analysis. A large part of DNA analysis was based on parser theory.

This paper was my introduction to DNA analysis as well as Chomsky hierarchy: https://www.jstor.org/stable/29774782 (I wasn't able to find a free copy).

IIRC, pseudoknots in RNA require context-free grammars to parse.

"compilers work before, it's surprisingly similar/related to linguistics."

Since compilers transform languages with a clearly defined grammar ... the connection to linguistics is maybe not so surprising after all.

Huh? So what is the meaning of the word???

I could probably do it - but you wouldn't like it. My dictionaries would be a linked-list, looking for a key becomes a linear search... (if you gave me C++ I'd use std::map) I'm assuming you will allow me to use the C standard library, if I have to implement strlen or malloc in that 500 lines of C I'm not sure I can pull that off. 500 lines is aggressive, but IOCCC gives me plenty of tricks to get the line count down and the language isn't that big. I'm also going to assume 100% valid python code is fed in, if there is a bug or error of any sort that is undefined behavior.

Note that most of what makes python great isn't the language, it is the library. I believe that large parts of the python library are also written in C (for speed), and thus you won't be able to use my 500 line python compiler for anything useful because you won't have any useful libraries.

A python VM that consumes bytecode might be doable in not-ludicrous-amounts of C. Not 500 lines I suppose. But something manageable I think? Especially if you targeted the older releases.

Maybe 500 lines of Pythonic, macro-heavy C. If the macros' LOC don't count. Maybe.

Not to be that guy, but Python is an interpreted language.

That said, I guess technically you could make something that compiles python to an executable? This is hacker news after all

Now do it without imports.

That is not a compiler. That is called a wrapper script. But funny none the less.