I was impressed that it fired right up from a make and I had a c interpreter shell less than 10 seconds after checking the project out. If 68k of LOC is a small project, what are your large ones? Do you still use PicoC ? What other systems has it been integrated into? What is the largest codebase it has executed? Can it interpret itself?
Only about 4,500 lines of that code is the actual C interpreter. The rest is support code, tests, platform-specific code etc..
I’m not using picoc myself right now but I do have a rocketry project in the pipeline I might use it for. I’ve used it in UAV projects in the past.
It’s been used by other people for a wide variety of things in the past. A lot of people embed it into their programs as a scripting language. It’s ideal for that since it’s small and portable and presents little surface area to integrate. Other people use it in embedded projects - robotics etc.. It’s been used in some commercial robotics systems too.
It can’t interpret itself since it doesn’t implement the full C standard. Keep in mind here that the aim of the project was to make a very small C implementation, not a complete one. It doesn’t implement things like struct bitfields, it doesn’t have a full C preprocessor and it doesn’t run particularly fast. It’s good for what it does though - running simple C scripts with a minimum of fuss.
Interesting project. Just a heads up in case people are not aware – if all you want is run “c programs (sort of) as scripts (on a x86 host), the Tiny C compiler might be a better bet: http://bellard.org/tcc/
Looks like this has a different focus than tcc though.
My co-worker is asking, why just not use normal compiler?
Edit:
Scripts are slightly simpler than standard C programs - all the system headers are included automatically for you so you don’t need to include them yourself. Also, scripts don’t have a main() function - they just have statements which are run directly.
I originally wrote it because I wanted to edit and run scripts on a tiny device with only 64k of RAM (an STM32 microcontroller). It turned out to be handy for other situations too - like when you want to add a simple scripting language to a C program and you don’t want to put in an entire compiler just for that.
This is really cool! I’ve always wanted to play around with a C interpreter!
I understand that it is completely impractical - but it is a shame this doesn’t support C99. I’d love to package a interpreter along with Cello because I think it would really help people learn the library a lot faster, and it suites the dynamic nature of it.
Author here. I’m rather stoked that people are still interested in my little project.
I was impressed that it fired right up from a
makeand I had a c interpreter shell less than 10 seconds after checking the project out. If 68k of LOC is a small project, what are your large ones? Do you still use PicoC ? What other systems has it been integrated into? What is the largest codebase it has executed? Can it interpret itself?Only about 4,500 lines of that code is the actual C interpreter. The rest is support code, tests, platform-specific code etc..
I’m not using picoc myself right now but I do have a rocketry project in the pipeline I might use it for. I’ve used it in UAV projects in the past.
It’s been used by other people for a wide variety of things in the past. A lot of people embed it into their programs as a scripting language. It’s ideal for that since it’s small and portable and presents little surface area to integrate. Other people use it in embedded projects - robotics etc.. It’s been used in some commercial robotics systems too.
It can’t interpret itself since it doesn’t implement the full C standard. Keep in mind here that the aim of the project was to make a very small C implementation, not a complete one. It doesn’t implement things like struct bitfields, it doesn’t have a full C preprocessor and it doesn’t run particularly fast. It’s good for what it does though - running simple C scripts with a minimum of fuss.
If one were to embed it as scripting language in another program, how does it compare in speed to LuaJIT?
LuaJIT will be many times faster than this.
Interesting project. Just a heads up in case people are not aware – if all you want is run “c programs (sort of) as scripts (on a x86 host), the Tiny C compiler might be a better bet: http://bellard.org/tcc/
Looks like this has a different focus than tcc though.
My co-worker is asking, why just not use normal compiler?
Edit:
I originally wrote it because I wanted to edit and run scripts on a tiny device with only 64k of RAM (an STM32 microcontroller). It turned out to be handy for other situations too - like when you want to add a simple scripting language to a C program and you don’t want to put in an entire compiler just for that.
This is really cool! I’ve always wanted to play around with a C interpreter!
I understand that it is completely impractical - but it is a shame this doesn’t support C99. I’d love to package a interpreter along with Cello because I think it would really help people learn the library a lot faster, and it suites the dynamic nature of it.
If you’re looking for a fully featured C interpreter there’s always CINT:
http://root.cern.ch/drupal/content/cint
It’s about 100x the code size of picoc but it claims “CINT covers most of ANSI C (mostly before C99) and ISO C++ 2003”