sp

I am making Cargo for C. I have 3/4 of a working demo; the tool can build itself, including some non-trivial dependencies which I've ported to build natively with the tool (instead of wrapping their Make or CMake or whatever). The pitch: It's insane that we have to pull in Python or Lua to build C code. CMake is an abomination against god that has become usable in spite of itself. Zig cc is proof that this entire ecosystem is an embarrassment. My tool gives C projects a TOML manifest, and builds scripts written in C and JIT compiled by the tool. Now, you can write build scripts in the language itself, pull in dependencies you wanted to use anyway. It also provides a stable ABI. There's an HTTP-backed index and a Git-backed index. And it generally does the same thing for C that, say, Bun did for JS/TS. You'll be able to run C files from s

> I am trying to track down where the function `sp_mem_allocator_alloc_type` is defined A quick glance at the source on github and here you go: https://github.com/tspader/sp/blob/e64697aa649907ce3357a7dd0... `sp_mem_allocator_alloc_type ` is going through a couple of macro resolutions which ends up at `sp_mem_allocator_alloc` > I'm not going to clone and build this (too dangerous). Your computer won't explode just from downloading and compiling some C code, don't worry ;) The github repo builds and the examples run just fine on macOS by just running `make` in the project directory, although with one warning: warning: 'posix_spawn_file_actions_addchdir_np' is deprecated: first deprecated in macOS 26.0

How would you write https://github.com/tspader/sp/blob/main/example/ls.c in your statically typed language of choice? To be fair, this is definitely the kindest example to my library, but one reason I felt this project was worth pursuing was that that example reads basically like a slightly worse TypeScript to me. In other words, quite nice for how low level the code really is.

Can you write more about the technical side? How does the transpilation work? Is it mostly naive / 1:1 or do you do any transforms on an AST? What will the language be good for when it's reasonably complete? What are you intentionally skipping? Or, to put it another way, the description: "Tight-C is a minimal systems programming language that transpiles to C. 10 keywords, no garbage collector, no inference, no OOP — just explicit, predictable code with C-level power." Tells me a lot about what it's not but not much about what it is. Just to be clear, this isn't really criticism. I've had similar ideas, so I think the proposition is basically good. I just think that anyone who would use such a language would want to know its technical core. Also, another piece of unsolicited advice, you should think of a nontrivial use that no existing lan

C is really, really ripe for tooling and modern libraries. There are a lot of great ones already that don’t resemble what I’ll call university C in the slightest (i.e. the C most of us remember writing; awful, bug filled, segfaulting) I’ve been building out my C standard library replacement in earnest for a little while. If you like this framework, check it out. https://github.com/tspader/sp