I only wrote the compiler. But ESP-IDF elf_loader component can do that, yes.

There is the TCC. Adapting that would probably be a faster path to a full featured C compiler on esp32 than building up my xcc700. This is more of an educational sandbox project.

I know, and there are chibicc, kefir, etc. .. and I have my own experimental C compiler.

I would love to see how you handle variably-modified types, the way I retrofitted them onto chibicc never felt quite right, and I've never seen another non-gcc/clang compiler fully support noplate's VM type patterns.

Maybe I fill find the time to clean it up and make it public. But did not find VM-types difficult to implement, the type just depends on some run-time value, so at the point in time where the size expression is evaluated, one stores the result in a hidden variable which the type refers to.

Looking forward to the release!

What I found troublesome were not really the caching of array count, but when and where should the side effect be represented in AST, for example this one: https://godbolt.org/z/rcT1d8WWe the puts() call is a side effect for automatic variable but completely ignored for static variable.

Yes, it is a bit of mess. We started to make this more precise in the C standard when those expression have to be evaluated, but there are still issues. And when this is involved extensions there are more issues. I think in this example, such initializer would not be allowed in ISO C. I also fixed many bugs in GCC .

Right, Rust is more complex, and it is the complex bits that make it Rust. There are sure some shortcuts possible for starters, for example scope-based lifetimes like in early Rust versions, but still, to make it a worthwhile upgrade over C, it would take some intermediate representation, and definitely more than 700 lines.

There is a lively movement for coding in Rust for esp32, that works, just not on the device I think.

I would love to see something like C with a borrow checker and Result/Option but not the fancy type system.

The big question is whether or not that is even possible. My money is on 'no'.

Thanks! That is just my small custom experimental mini shell. This project started as a retro DOS-like cyberdeck, and first thing I tried to run there was DOS programs, which is why it looks like that. Only got to COM files, when I learned about elf_loader, so I now focus on that. I might extract and release whatever is valuable/reusable in that shell later on.

Yeah, very cool. I was thinking about possibly porting it to risc-v and using it on my fpga based core. I was trying to build a monitor style shell, but C like environment would be very cool.

Porting to different CPU/bytecodes should be doable. Just keep in mind that in ESP-IDF we also get the dynamic linker and the libc for free (and any other C functions exposed in the firmware). On the other platforms, that may be some extra work for the compiler.

Yea I was understanding that hurdle, but thanks for the reminder.

Thanks for posting this here. I star’d the project. Getting a portable computer with a minimal flexible and previously well supported operating system was one of my goals for the esp32 as well. I’ll be watching for more.