tcc4tcl (Tiny C Compiler for Tcl) is a Tcl extension that provides an interface to TinyCC.
This Repo is based on tcc 0.9.27
Latest development version based on latest tinycc mob can be found here tcc4tcl_dev
It is a fork of tcctcl by Mark Janssen.
It is licensed under the terms of the LGPL v2.1 (or later).
Github mirror of original project.
The tcc4tcl package allows access from Tcl to TinyCC, a compact, self-contained and portable C preprocessor, compiler, linker and assembler. As such, it can be an excellent interactive tool for quickly and easily providing C-coded speed enhancements for performance-critical sections of a Tcl program, as well as generally for learning C and prototyping C code.
On top of that, tcc4tcl adds features that make it easy to create binary package extensions that efficiently use the Tcl C API and stubs interface feature for adding commands to a Tcl interpreter and managing libraries.
On Unix, compile the package using the standard commands:
$ configure; make
On Windows, run the script win32/build-tcc4tcl-win32.bat
Once the package is built and the build directory is added to the Tcl package path list, you can test with the following commands in a Tcl shell:
% package require tcc4tcl
0.40
% ::tcc4tcl::cproc test {int i} int { return (i+42); }
TCC_COMPILE_OK
% test 1
43
Tcc4tcl can be used as a "just in time" compiler, compiling C code embedded in a Tcl script on the fly as the script is executing. The TinyCC compiler is designed to be so fast that the compilation time for modest functions will be small compared to the total execution time of a typical program.
C functions once compiled and wrapped by tcc4tcl can then be executed as standard Tcl commands in a running interpreter or program.
Tcc4tcl can also be used to save compiled C code in a Tcl package extension in the form of a shared library object file. Such a file can be loaded later into a newly-started Tcl interpreter using the standard Tcl load command, thus saving the need to compile the code each time it is needed.
Standalone executable programs can also be compiled and saved to a binary executable file.
In addition to writing and compiling new Tcl commands in C, tcc4tcl can be used to wrap existing compiled C functions from a shared or static library file, and call the wrapped functions as Tcl commands. For example, assuming there exists a shared library /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libcurl.so, the following can be done to make the curl API command "curl_version" callable from Tcl:
% set handle [tcc4tcl::new]
::tcc4tcl::tcc_1
% $handle cwrap curl_version {} vstring
curl_version {tcl_curl_version vstring {}}
% $handle add_library_path /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu
/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu
% $handle add_library curl
curl
% $handle go
TCC_COMPILE_OK
% curl_version
libcurl/7.47.0 OpenSSL/1.0.2g zlib/1.2.8 libidn/1.32 librtmp/2.3
Tcc4tcl can be used to embed Tcl code into a C function and thus make the Tcl code callable from within C code. Thus you can for example create a Tcl package that combines Tcl and C within a single shared library package extension file.
The tcc4tcl package includes the file tcc4critcl.tcl, which includes shim procedures that map a subset of CriTcl commands to tcc4tcl equivalents. Thus some projects that have used CriTcl in the past to incorporate C code into Tcl programs may be able to use tcc4tcl as an alternative. Example scripts for compiling tcllibc are included.
The tcc4tcl package has been updated to use the latest official release of TinyCC, 0.9.27, replacing version 0.9.26.
Improvements have been made to make tcc4tcl compile and run correctly on the Windows platform, and to incorporate the Tk C API properly.
Header files tclInt.h and tclIntdecls.h and their dependencies are included and tcc4tcl will populate not only tclStubsPtr, but tclIntStubsPtr also. This is neccessary to run Tom Pointdexter's Tcl Static Prime transpiler, since it uses Tcl_PushCallframe/Tcl_PopCallframe, which are Tcl internals.
This repository is a fork made in an effort to combine multiple independent contributions to the project and to upgrade the TinyCC compiler used (0.9.26, released 2013) to the latest release (0.9.27, released 2017).
All independent contributions and the upgraded TinyCC 0.9.27 code have been merged to the "master" branch. Anyone interested in giving this package a try is encouraged to check out or download this branch.
This repository was forked from cyanolgivie's fork of rkeene's repository.
A branch called "tcllab" was created from the commit representing the last official release (tcc4tcl 0.30) made by rkeene.
Another branch called "upgrade_tcc_0_9_27" was created from the last official release commit, for the purpose of carrying out the upgrade to tinycc 0.9.27.
The "upgrade_tcc_0_9_27" branch has been merged into the "master" branch, which is now the main development branch. Experimental enhancements will continue to be made on the "upgrade_tcc_0_9_27" branch and will be merged into the master branch as they are ready.
Latest development version based on latest tinycc mob can be found here tcc4tcl_dev
Michael Richter originated the upgrade effort and is the chief author of the current improvements.
Steve Huntley provided assistance and advice.