C89cc.sh – standalone C89/ELF64 compiler in pure portable shell

5 comments

• kelsey98765431 3 hours ago
  Would be a lot better if it came with tests. Please do this justice and dont let it rot as a gist, make a real repo and add some docs and at least smoke tests or some kind. Thanks
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  • fuhsnn 2 hours ago
    Don't understand why you were downvoted. An untested C compiler is simply worthless.
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    • nananana9 9 minutes ago
      The 2026 brain simply cannot comprehend recreational programming.
• gaigalas 1 day ago
  Single standalone file, no external tools used, PATH='' (empty), portable (bash, dash, ksh, zsh), produces x86 ELF executables, has mini-libc builtin.

  Usage:

  printf 'int main(){puts("hello");return 0;}' | sh c89cc.sh > hello

  chmod +x hello

  ./hello

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  • t-3 28 minutes ago
    Why not POSIX or some common external tools where it makes sense? Most of those big switch statements could be easily replaced with some standard programs that already exist everywhere.
  • angry_octet 3 hours ago
    I can't think of a reason to use c89cc.sh, but I salute this effort nonetheless.
  • jonahx 29 minutes ago
    gorgeous!
• _ache_ 2 hours ago
  I'm tempted to execute it, but it may as well be shellcode I couldn't tell.
• jey 3 hours ago
  It targets x86-64/ELF? I thought it would target `sh` to be portable?
• dmitrygr 3 hours ago
  Many parts of this are clearly autogenerated, but that in no way diminishes the sickening impressiveness of it!
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  • userbinator 3 hours ago
    It would be far more interesting to look at what this was "compiled" from; it looks like the output of a state-machine generator.
  • phire 3 hours ago
    It does make it a little hard to understand how the parser/ast_builder works.

    But the rest seems easy enough to understand.

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    • fuhsnn 2 hours ago
      > It does make it a little hard to understand

      Or much easier to backdoor...