And the subsequent youtube hype videos of "COMPILER WRITING IS OVER!"

There actually was an article like this from Anthropic the other day but instead of 5 minutes I think it was weeks and $20,000 worth of tokens. Don't have the link handy though.

I may have missed this. Do you have a link when AI verbatim copied tcc and it was publicized? I have my doubts.

Riiiight, I forgot about htat.

I've never seen another repo with public commit access like that. I guess the project is niche enough that you don't get spammed with bad or malicious commits.

I would be interested in contributing to this but the UK is geoblocked.

It is also interesting to note that while the repository is quite active, there has not been any release for _8 years_, and the website is the same one at the top of this conversation, i.e. the one where the old maintainer says he quit and the benchmarks are from 20 years ago.

A small and minimalistic C compiler is actually a very important foundational project for the software world IMNSHO.

I'm definitely reminded of: https://xkcd.com/2347/

Years ago I built a scripting language that transpiled to TCC and then compiled to machine code in memory. It produced human-readable C code so it was very easy to get going: when debugging the compiler I could just look at the generated C code without having to learn any special infrastructure/ecosystem/syntax etc. Plus basically zero-overhead interop with C out of the box => immediate access to a lot of existing libraries (although a few differences in calling conventions between TCC and GCC did bite me once). Another feature I had was "inline C" if you wanted to go low level, it was super trivial to add, too. It was pretty fast, maybe two times slower than GCC, IIRC, but more than enough for a scripting language.

libtcc doesn't give you much control AST wise, you basically just feed it strings. I'm using it for the purpose you mentioned though--scripting language backend--since for my current "scripting-language" project I can emit C89, and it's plenty fast enough for a REPL!

    /* add a file (either a C file, dll, an object, a library or an ld script). Return -1 if error. */
    int tcc_add_file(TCCState *s, const char *filename);

    /* compile a string containing a C source. Return non zero if error. */
    int tcc_compile_string(TCCState *s, const char *buf);

> The professor just really liked tcc for some reason.

Perhaps, or maybe they just got tired of students coming in and claiming that their program worked perfectly on such-and-such compiler.[1] It looks like tcc would run on most systems from the time of its introduction, and perhaps some that are a great deal older. When I took a few computer science courses, they were much more restrictive. All code had to be compiled with a particular compiler on their computers, and tested on their computers. They said it was to prevent cheating but, given how trivial it would have been to cheat with their setup, I suspect it had more to do with shutting down arguments with students who came in to argue over grades.

[1] I was a TA in the physical sciences for a few years. Some students would try to argue anything for a grade, and would persist if you let them.

Seems like a good way to get students to write C rather than GNU C.

That is, I believe, one the points of AI and Open Source many contacts. Something like TCC, with a good coding agent and a developer that cares about the project, and knows enough about it, can turn into a project that can be maintained without the otherwise large efforts needed, that resulted into the project being abandoned. I'm resurrecting many projects of mine I had no longer the time to handle, like dump1090, linenoise, ...

I don't think it is not maintained, there is plenty of activity going on in the repo: https://repo.or.cz/tinycc.git, they just don't seem to be cutting releases?

Still maintained. You have the mob repo in another comment.

Debian, Fedora, Arch and others pull their package from the mob repo. They're pretty good at pulling in CVE fixes almost immediately.

Thomas Preud'homme is the new maintainer lead, though the code is a mob approach.

There's still activity on the mailing list. It may still be maintained.

https://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/tinycc-devel/2026-02/t...