C code generators

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Richard Suchenwirth 2001-01-02: A couple of holidays without work or family gave me the opportunity to install the Cygwin suite (gcc and lotsa Unix tools) on my W95/P200 box at home, and play with C. I soon noticed that some monotonous tasks could be better delegated to a program, and that would of course be in Tcl. So in a few days, I wrote three code generators with the following features:

All take some specifications from the user (C codelets) and use these, together with some constant text, to produce a complete C source file in a (temporary?) directory, and mostly call the compiler to produce an executable, and generate a Tcl "wrapper proc" that allows to call the new program from Tcl.
cproc (Outsourcing C helpers) looks almost like a Tcl proc - except that the body is in C... It makes a tiny main around the cbody, and the wrapper just says exec /path/name $args

cproc strrev {s} {
    /* Revert a string */
    char *cp = s+strlen(s);
    while(cp > s) putchar(*--cp);
}

  strrev "A man, a plan, a canal: Panama" ;#= amanaP :lanac a ,nalp a ,nam A

cserver (Pipe servers in C from Tcl) allows to specify a more complex system with a number of "methods", including (optional) "constructors" and "destructors", that maintains state between calls (the example on that page is for a bitmap server that allows setting, unsetting, getting bits in a possibly large, densely packed array - one bit per bit ;-) . The C program is started as a bidirectional pipe and communicated with via gets and puts (again wrapped into a Tcl proc)
cxtend (Extending Tcl in C from Tcl) was the last in the series and the most fun: it produces an extended wish or tclsh that contains additional C functions - straight from the examples in Brent Welch's book. I only have to admit that this was late on New Years' day, and I could only get it to make a decent C source, but calling gcc from Tcl brought lib path specification problems that I haven't solved yet. The generated source linked flawlessly from inside bash, and the call there isn't that difficult:

gcc mywish.c -o mywish -s -Wall -ltcl80 -ltk80

The -s switch strips all symbols from the executable, bringing it down from over 300k to just 3.5k - pretty amazing for a custom wish... Compilation time is 2..3 sec, starting up an executable from Tcl takes ~90 msec.

Here's how a wish extended with strrev (in a different implementation, swapping chars in place this time) is specified:

cxtend -Tk 1 -name mywish -cc gcc -ccflags {-s -Wall} -cmd {
    strrev {char* s} {
        char *cp0, *cp1, t;
        for(cp0=s, cp1=s+strlen(s)-1; cp1 > cp0; cp0++, cp1--) {
            t=*cp0; *cp0=*cp1; *cp1=t;
        }
    } {char* s}
}

AK: Note GNU Lightning, a library for on-the-fly generation of executable machine code.

RS 2007-10-02: I like Odyce for that purpose most, these days...

I suppose that this would also be appropriate to mention here?

What: Embedded C (EC)
Where: ftp://ftp.reed.edu/pub/users/greaber/ec-0.1.tar.gz
Description: Allows you to include C code in your Tcl scripts, compiling and dynamically loading it on the fly. The code will also be cached so the next time you run the program, you don't wait for it to compile. Known to work on DEC OSF/1 V3.2 and SunOS 5.5. Not yet ported to Macintosh or Windows.
Updated: 1996-09
Contact: mailto:[email protected] (Grant Reaber)

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