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C89cc.sh – standalone C89/ELF64 compiler in pure portable shell

136 points by gaigalas

by redoh

0 subcomment

Writing a C compiler in pure shell is one of those projects that sounds absurd until you think about bootstrapping. If you want to compile C on a system where you literally have nothing but a POSIX shell, this is exactly what you need. The fact that the parser itself is BNF-generated from shell modules makes it even more interesting as a study in how far you can push shell scripting before it breaks. Would love to see this evolve into a proper repo with tests so it can actually serve as a minimal bootstrapping tool.

by kelsey98765431

2 subcomments

Would be a lot better if it came with tests. Please do this justice and dont let it rot as a gist, make a real repo and add some docs and at least smoke tests or some kind. Thanks

by gaigalas

3 subcomments

Single standalone file, no external tools used, PATH='' (empty), portable (bash, dash, ksh, zsh), produces x86 ELF executables, has mini-libc builtin.
Usage:
printf 'int main(){puts("hello");return 0;}' | sh c89cc.sh > hello
chmod +x hello
./hello

by uecker

0 subcomment

by wengo314

0 subcomment

by JackSmith_YC

1 subcomments

Pure shell. Love the minimalism here... especially when every tiny CLI tool these days seems to require a 50MB node_modules folder just to run. There’s a certain Zen in doing things with zero dependencies. Reminds me of why I got into Unix in the first place.

by _ache_

0 subcomment

by jey

2 subcomments

by dmead

0 subcomment

by dmitrygr

3 subcomments

Many parts of this are clearly autogenerated, but that in no way diminishes the sickening impressiveness of it!

by self_awareness

1 subcomments

"Claude please generate me a C compiler in bash"
I mean, today it's possible to generate it in Tcl, Elisp, Windows BAT, Powershell.
The effort is just 1 prompt.
The WHY question is much more important today -- "because I can" no longer makes sense, because we all can do much, much more with minimum effort today than before LLMs.