[gambit-list] Using TCC

Marc Feeley feeley at iro.umontreal.ca
Tue Feb 12 13:09:07 EST 2013


Very cool!  I have been a fan of TCC for a long time and have been interested in combining TCC and Gambit to make a standalone distribution of Gambit.  I'm glad to see that TCC can compile Gambit generated code.  Could you try building Gambit using TCC?  I wonder how fast TCC generated code is.

Marc


On 2013-02-08, at 3:50 PM, Fred Weigel <fred.weigel at zylog.ca> wrote:

> All:
> 
> I generally hack on a netbook, which has a very slow hard drive (but is
> 1.66 GHz, 1 GB memory). So, gsc using gcc is a bit slow sometimes. I
> decided to try tcc (Gambit-C 4.6.6 - 64 bit - Fedora 17, tcc 0.9.25 -
> built from current web distribution).
> 
> http://bellard.org/tcc/
> 
> http://download.savannah.nongnu.org/releases/tinycc/tcc-0.9.25.tar.bz2
> 
> 0.9.25 supports 64 bit x86 code.
> 
> 
> I did not rebuild gsi or gsc with tcc, but simply incorporated tcc into
> the gambc-cc script.
> 
> 
> Results:
> 
> With 13,156 lines of Scheme (my "standard library")
> 
> Building with tcc:
> 
> real 0m25.577s
> user 0m18.633s
> sys 0m3.290s
> 
> 4,465,784 bytes of object code.
> 
> Building with gcc (4.7.2):
> 
> real 3m47.997s
> user 3m8.047s
> sys 0m11.283s
> 
> With 4,004,348 bytes of object obtained.
> 
> Now, I haven't tested the results extensively at all, but I am very
> happy so far (no obvious problems).
> 
> The change made to gambc-cc is an insertion at line 13 (just above
> DEFS_OBJ=...). I added the following hack:
> 
> ==> Cut <==
> # If CC is tcc, use that instead. We use tcc 0.9.25
> # Most of the options are meaningless with this compiler, but we grab
> # the ones that do make sense. Gambit-C itself has not been built with
> # tcc (I use the Fedora repo version of 4.6.6), but code that is
> # generated by gsc is compiled with tcc. So far, no problems! (larger
> # code size by up to 40% for "Hello world", but MUCH faster compilation
> # of C files).
> if [ "$CC" == "tcc" ]; then
>  C_COMPILER="tcc"
>  FLAGS_OBJ="-g -Wall"
>  FLAGS_DYN="-g -Wall -rdynamic -shared"
>  FLAGS_LIB="-g -Wall -rdynamic -shared"
>  FLAGS_EXE="-g -Wall -rdynamic"
> fi
> ==> Cut <==
> 
> To use, simply define CC=tcc in your enviroment (export CC=tcc), or put
> a similar statement into the Makefile (presuming that is used).
> 
> I have not measured execution speed of Scheme code at all, but a 6x
> improvement in compilation speed is worth continuing along this path
> (for me, anyway). Typically, object size increases by 10% (for my
> standard library) to 40% (for a simple "hello world" example).
> 
> I won't be able to expend cycles benchmarking code with tcc -- I am
> more interested in any failure cases from this compiler. Maybe
> someone can do a benchmark run?
> 
> Fred Weigel




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