Version 45 of C

Updated 2003-06-25 19:09:06

C [L1 ] is a programming language found first [L2 ] on Unix systems but now found on many platforms.

http://www.eskimo.com/~scs/C-faq/top.html

The ANSI comittee as well as the ISO comittee have approved a standard reference for C.

See http://www.lysator.liu.se/c/ for pointers to various papers.

Related pages: Tcl and other languages, and Critcl

Compilers

Support for C is traditionally provided by a compiler.

The FSF's gcc compiler is a quite popular C compiler found on many platforms and operating systems.

Also, most Unix systems have vendor supported compilers. They are often unbundled products these days. Sun is one of the vendors who have this type of product.

There is also tcc, the "Tiny C Compiler".

[In the following list, be certain to indicate whether or not you have built Tcl and Tk with the compiler in question.] On Microsoft Windows there are many options, including

  • Visual C++ from Microsoft (commercial),
  • C++Builder from Borland (commercial; an older command-line version is still available as a free download),
  • the Cygwin C compiler (free; a version of gcc; for some strange reason it cannot be used to compile the Tcl source code out-of-the-box - but Cygwin comes with its own version of Tcl at least),
  • the Mingw C compiler [L3 ] (free; another version of gcc for Windows with goals slightly different from Cygwin),
  • CodeWarrior [L4 ] (commercial),
  • Digital Mars C [L5 ] (free), which was once Zortech C and later became Symantec C,
  • LCC-Win32 [L6 ] (free) [Can that compile Tcl itself?],
  • Intel C++ compiler [L7 ] (commercial)
  • OpenWatcom C++ compiler [L8 ] (free?) [No idea if it can compile Tcl.]

etc.

The number of C compilers available on MacOS is more limited. There is

  • CodeWarrior by Metrowerks [L9 ] (commercial) for MacOS Classic and MacOS X,
  • Apple's MPW for MacOS Classic (free download),
  • gcc for MacOS X (free; download from Apple); either used stand-alone or with Apple's ProjectBuilder IDE (included in the download).

"""Interpreters"""

Support for C can also take the form of an interpreter.

For instance, a recent advertisement for Ch, a product at http://www.softintegration.com/ , is interesting. It is a C/C++ interpreter that runs cross-platform on a large number of operating systems and hardware. It provides not only standard language features, but also support for 2 and 3 dimensional plotting, shell programming, and numerical programming. It supports 1990 ISO C standard as well as C99 features. In Jan, 2003, the product page for Ch Standard says that the product is free for use on Unix, Linux, and Mac OS X.

"""Linkable Compilers"""

Support for C can also take the form of a run-time compiler.

tcc provides a libtcc library, which allows a running program to compile and link C code without touching disk. In milliseconds for a small chunk of code. (x86 only as of Jun 2003)

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