SectorC: A C Compiler in 512 bytes

126 points22 comments5 hours ago
mati365

Oh, it looks like my X86-16 boot sector C compiler that I made recently [1]. Writing boot sector games has a nostalgic magic to it, when programming was actually fun and showed off your skills. It's a shame that the AI era has terribly devalued these projects.

[1] https://github.com/Mati365/ts-c-compiler

xorvoid

I may be the author.. enjoy! It was an absolute blast making this!

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mojuba

Compare that to the C compiler in 100,000 lines written by Claude in two weeks for $20,000 (I think was posted on HN just yesterday)

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sanufar

The way hashing is used for tokens and for making a pseudo symbol table is such an elegant idea.

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riedel

Beautiful, but make sure to quickly add 2023 to the title.

Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36064971

gonzus

Lacking support for structs, I think this is too minimalistic to be called "a C compiler".

NooneAtAll3

> I wrote a fairly straight-forward and minimalist lexer and it took >150 lines of C code

was it supposed to be "<150"?

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SeanSullivan86

Why is it called a C Compiler if it's a subset of C?

kayo_20211030

Nice. Very K&R-ish. Not a bad thing.