Re: [Tinycc-devel] support for OOP in C

[Jared Maddox]

> Date: Thu, 16 Jul 2015 09:38:04 -0400
> From: Chris Marshall <address@hidden>
> To: address@hidden
> Subject: Re: [Tinycc-devel] support for OOP in C
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>         <address@hidden>
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> I'm new to the tcc-devel list but the thread last month at
>
>   http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/tinycc-devel/2015-06/msg00002.html
>
> is directly relevant to my interest in tcc which is to enable
> JIT computing to the Perl Data Language along with a new,
> symmetric framework for computation so that routines can
> be defined either at the "C" level or at the Perl level and
> called from either.
>
> The basis for this capability would bea C level OOP such as
> the one discussed in the abovethread.  The good news is
> that the author of the OOP in C book has implemented a
> couple of iterations in his studies.  The latest is COS (the
> C Object System) which is documented as the replacement
> for all the previous implementations.
>
>   http://ldeniau.web.cern.ch/ldeniau/cos.html
>   https://github.com/CObjectSystem/COS
>
> The features and capability look very good and I believe
> will be sufficient for PDL development save the fact that
> it apparently doesn't work on windows without some
> sort of POSIX layer (cygwin or such).  From studying
> the code, it appears that restriction is actually the build
> and not the library which only needs C99 preprocessor
> and C89 or greater compiler.
>
> The license is Apache.
>

I haven't downloaded it, but my impression is that it's simply a
library. If you're wanting TCC to have OOP language extensions, then
I'd really suggest putting almost (or maybe literally) everything into
a "compile to C" branch, instead of embedding it directly into the TCC
C compiler.

There are few enough developers that directly enlarging the C codebase
is probably not a good idea, making something like Vala a better idea.