Re: [MiNT] Compiling with gcc: ld eats all ram

[Evan Langlois <Evan@CoolRunningConcepts.com>]

On Thu, 2005-10-20 at 11:02 +0200, Miro Kropacek wrote:
> I think you're too unfair to gcc - it's true it takes more memory than 
> pure c :) but simple hello world is compilable. Try to decrease harddisk 
> cache to minimum and compile it in console, not under XaAES/N.AES. I 
> coded even more complicated programs with 14 MB falcon in this way.

Considering my mail reader is currently using 166MB of memory, GCC isn't
all that much of a hog by comparison.

If anyone with a lot of C experience wants to tackle porting a compiler,
the TCC compiler uses very little memory and compiles about 12 times
faster than GCC.  Its so fast you can actually use C as a script
language and use "#!/usr/bin/tcc -run" at the top of your C file to
compile and run it in one step .. or link your program with libtcc and
you can compile C from plain strings in your own programs, allowing you
to use C as embedded scripting language!  There's even a Linux
bootloader available that will compile your whole kernel using TCC on
the fly as you boot (allowing systems to insert/remove options based on
hardware detection).

TCC is much easier to port than GCC, but of course, there is a lot of
Atari specific stuff you'd have to mess with.  Its designed to be
largely compatible with GCC, so options and object files should be
compatible.

-- Evan