Cuik (pronounced 'Quick')

warning: unfinished

The plan is a modern C11 compiler which can mostly work with Clang, GCC, and MSVC while also introducing some new ideas.

Why write a C compiler?

• To improve the compile times on debug builds without sacrificing features like I would with TCC.
• To test out my upcoming (and currently private) compiler backend.
• To add some extensions to improve the workflow of C programmers.
• Because I can.

How to install?

Mac & Linux aren't ready yet but i'll be moving forward to those platforms in the upcoming months

You'll need MSVC installed on windows (i use link.exe for now... sorry, i'll write a linker soon enough)

Just take a C compiler and compile the compile.c file and run it, if you want an optimized build add RELEASE_BUILD as a preprocessor define with -D or /D. Then you should have a cuik executable in your build/ directory, you can add that directory to your path if you want.

How am I doing?

mostly aight, thanks for asking.

What are some cool new things?

One of my favorite new features are the live compiler (essentially an offline Godbolt but within a terminal) and the out of order declarations.

What architectures will you support?

I'll be starting with x64 but I plan on having Aarch64 support soon enough, it's mostly a matter of user-demand what other platforms I add though I probably won't be supporting anything with a segmented address space because I don't want to implement it.

What OSes will you support?

Ideally the essentials like Windows, Linux and MacOS but currently MacOS isn't setup and Linux has basic support (no live compiler)

Will it have optimizations?

It will eventually have a smart but non-aggressive optimizer but that's still a work in progress

What C extensions will you have?

I'll be supporting all the normal extensions such as:

• pragma once
• builtin bitmath (popcount, ffs, clz, ctz, etc)
• __builtin_trap, __builtin_expect
• x86 SIMD intrinsics
• typeof
• case ranges
• computed goto

And some possibly novel extensions such as:

• Out of order functions
• Tagged unions

What's left?

It can currently compile programs using the subset of C it currently supports but it's still missing some essential details before it compiles any basic C program such as:

• More tests
• Bug fixes
• Self hosting
• Thread local
• Atomics (halfway there)
• MSVC extensions
• GNU extensions
• Proper Mac/Linux support

PS

If you're wondering about the tinybackend static library, it's essentially a project of mine that's not ready for everyone's precious eyes so i've been sharing it just enough to actually let people play with the compiler but not play with the backend (it'll be open source eventually).