HN Reader

If this implementation had existed in the 1980s, the C standard would have a rule that different tokens hashing to the same 16-bit value invoke undefined behavior, and optimizing compilers in the 2000s would simply optimize such tokens away to a no-op. ;)

Compare that to the C compiler in 100,000 lines written by Claude in two weeks for $20,000 (I think was posted on HN just yesterday)

Oh, it looks like my X86-16 boot sector C compiler that I made recently [1]. Writing boot sector games has a nostalgic magic to it, when programming was actually fun and showed off your skills. It's a shame that the AI era has terribly devalued these projects.

[1] https://github.com/Mati365/ts-c-compiler

The way hashing is used for tokens and for making a pseudo symbol table is such an elegant idea.

Nice. Very K&R-ish. Not a bad thing.

I may be the author.. enjoy! It was an absolute blast making this!

This is so cool!

Fun fact, Tiny C Compiler was derived from such a C compiler submitted to the the International Obfuscated C Code Contest.

https://www.ioccc.org/2001/bellard/index.html

> I wrote a fairly straight-forward and minimalist lexer and it took >150 lines of C code

was it supposed to be "<150"?

Reminds me of Allegro SizeHack where we made games in 10KB - but we were using C and Allegro library!

https://www.oocities.org/trentgamblin/sizehack/entries.html#...

Beautiful, but make sure to quickly add 2023 to the title.

Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36064971

Why is it called a C Compiler if it's a subset of C?

Lacking support for structs, I think this is too minimalistic to be called "a C compiler".