c89cc.sh - standalone C89/ELF64 compiler in pure portable shell

6 points by olliej

We have tags for all sorts of languages, but nothing for shell? :D

dzwdz

"The main show are the techniques for writing portable shell scripts, not the compiler." (as said by the author)
There's a shell it can compile, that can also run the compiler itself.
AFAICT, (parts of?) the code were generated by a BNF-to-shell compiler. See the comment, the source.
Oh, and "c89cc.sh was definitely AI-assisted", "but way less than one might think". The author did a bunch of experiments in this vein before AI.

idk, this just echoes the Rust compiler in PHP for me. a few years ago i would've thought this is a really cool project. not because it's in any way practical, but because it's a show of skill in an obscure language and dedication. you gotta be crazy (in a good way) to work on something like this, and i admire that

if you automate "the boring, mechanical work"... well, that kinda feels like automating the point of it away, doesn't it.

i'd be happy to hear about the shell portability tricks, the bnf-to-shell compiler sounds interesting, but instead i've got 8000 lines of shell that the author couldn't even be bothered to write

"i did $COMPLICATED_THING in $SILLY_ENVIRONMENT" just doesn't really have its punch nowadays, i guess

alexandria

if you automate "the boring, mechanical work"... well, that kinda feels like automating the point of it away, doesn't it.

i'd be happy to hear about the shell portability tricks, the bnf-to-shell compiler sounds interesting, but instead i've got 8000 lines of shell that the author couldn't even be bothered to write

Oh my god, thank you for highlighting this. I did ask myself if it was AI generated at the start of reading, saw some things that set off some mental flags, and came here to check.

I wholeheartedly agree. The point in something like this is that you're doing it partly to see if it can be done, and partly as performance art. It's all about the very human struggle of figuring out ways of fitting things into places where they shouldn't be, and then sitting down to actually do that. My interest drops into the negative now knowing it's vibecoded.