This is very nice. I'm currently writing a minimalist C compiler although my goal isn't fitting in a boot sector, it's more targeted at 8-bit systems with a lot more room than that.

This is a great demonstration of how simple the bare bones of C are, which I think is one reason I and many others find it so appealing despite how Spartan it is. C really evolved from B which was a demake of Fortran, if Ken Thompson is to be trusted.

Would and how much would it shrink when if, while, and for were replaced by the simple goto routine? (after all, in assembly there is only jmp and no other fancy jump instruction (I assume) ).

And PS, it's "chose your own adventure". :-) I love minimalism.

An interesting use case - for the compiler as-is or for the essentiall idea of barely-C - might be in bootstrapping chains, i.e. starting from tiny platform-specific binaries one could verify the disassembly of, and gradually building more complex tools, interpreters, and compiler, so that eventually you get to something like a version of GCC and can then build an entire OS distribution.

Examples:

https://github.com/cosinusoidally/mishmashvm/

and https://github.com/cosinusoidally/tcc_bootstrap_alt/

I think the same. Really nice project and good trick with hashing tokens.

PS. There left 21 bytes (21 * 0x00 - from 0x01e0 to 0x01fd). Maybe something can be packed there ;)

It's a fun comparison, but with the notable difference that that one can compile the Linux kernel and generate code for multiple different architectures, while this one can only compile a small proportion of valid C. It's a great project, but it's not so much a C compiler, as a compiler for a subset of C that allows all programs this compiler can compile to also be compiled by an actual C compiler, but not vice versa.

They're saying the naive implementation was more than 150 lines of C code (300-450 bytes), i.e. too big.