ELelvis70·Sep 24, 2020Submission
SCC – Small C Compiler for DOS
28 points · Open discussionmras0
scc
C2020–2020
mras0 / scc
scc
SCC - Small C Compiler for DOS
2Distinct people
3Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
102GitHub stars
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What it is
SCC - Small C Compiler for DOS
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What people are saying
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 1:49:46 PM UTC.
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Mentions over time
HN mentions by month3 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2020-01-08 18:49:45 UTC to 2020-09-24 11:32:46 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jan 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-02-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| Feb 2020 | 2020-02-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-03-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| Mar 2020 | 2020-03-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-04-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Apr 2020 | 2020-04-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-05-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| May 2020 | 2020-05-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-06-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Jun 2020 | 2020-06-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-07-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Jul 2020 | 2020-07-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-08-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Aug 2020 | 2020-08-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-09-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Sep 2020 | 2020-09-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-10-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
What Hacker News says
3 sourcesHadn't seen Mini-C before, that's quite the feat. Apart from the awesome C4, I also like 8cc (https://github.com/rui314/8cc) in this category.
Recently did this myself (https://github.com/mras0/scc/blob/master/scc.c) but it took waaaaay more than 10 hours and I had many previous failed attempts before that.
In A bestiary of single-file implementations of programming languagesI don't have a good resource, but having just finished a small C-compiler myself[0] after previously getting stuck on the codegen part, I have a few suggestions:
Keep it simple and focus on making it composable. By that I mean if you're targeting x86 keep the current value in [r|e]ax (forget about non-integer stuff for now :), if it's a stack based VM: focus on the stack top. A numeric literal loads [r|e]ax (or pushes it on the stack). Binary operators first pushes computes the lhs; pushes the result; computes rhs, combines and leaves the result in [r|e]ax (or the stack top).
Output to some kind of text format and lean on existing tools. It's probably not a bad idea to output C, LLVM bitcode, JVM/.NET bytecode or x86 assembly at first rather than going all the way to machine code starting out.
Postpone thinking about optimizations and red
Read the rest
uce your level of ambition. All of my previous attempts at finishing compiler projects failed because the complexity got out of hand. For instance in a C compiler don't try to optimize expressions of smaller-than-int types. Maybe all expressions in your language can be calculated using doubles?
Finally as GP says: You need to be comfortable with the output language (assembly or otherwise). Study the output of similar compilers and translate code by hand into assembly to get a feel of what your compiler should be doing.
[0]: https://github.com/mras0/scc