TinyCC compiler bundle

TinyCC (or tcc) is a small, fast C compiler capable of compiling python extensions that can be loaded as python modules or producing DLLs that can be loaded via ctypes. This version includes compilers for 32-bit and 64-bit Windows. MacOS and Linux are not supported in this release.

Compiler version: 0.9.26 2013-02-16

Installation of the compiler and the python interface is simply:

pip install tinycc

Full documentation for the compiler is available at http://bellard.org/tcc. Source and binaries are available from https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/tinycc/. The tinycc python package is hosted at https://github.com/SasView/tinycc.

TCC is the full path to the tcc.exe executable. Note that the executable path may contain spaces so it must be wrapped in quotes when used as part of an os.system command.

TCC_VERSION is the compiler version.

Python extension

Adding tinycc as a compiler option to setup.py:

import tinycc.distutils

When this is done, then you can build your project with:

python setup.py build --compiler=tinycc

Note that tinycc does not support C++ so it cannot be used a replacement for MS Visual C++ for Python or mingw as generic compiler for python installs.

Also note that the compiler does not fully support C99, and some constructs which compile (e. g., returning a structure from a function call) may not work in properly. Be sure to test thoroughly before setting tinycc as a recommended compiler for your python package.

Shared library

Building a DLL:

from tinycc import compile
dll_path = compile("hello.c")

This creates "hello.dll" in the same directory as "hello.c", raising RuntimeError if the compile fails. The exception contains the compiler output. Use compile(source, target) to control the path to the dll.

For more flexibility, you can call the compiler directly:

import os
import subprocess
from tinycc import TCC

source, target = "hello.c", "hello.dll"
command = [TCC, "-shared", "-rdynamic", "-Wall", source, "-o", target]
try:
    # need shell=True on windows to keep console box from popping up
    subprocess.check_output(command, shell=True, stderr=subprocess.STDOUT)
except subprocess.CalledProcessError as exc:
    raise RuntimeError("compile failed.\n%s\n%s"%(command_str, exc.output))
if not os.path.exists(target):
    raise RuntimeError("compile failed.  File is in %r"%source)

Use data_files to gather the data files required for bundling tinycc in a py2exe package. This places the compiler in the tinycc-data directory beside the library.zip generated by py2exe. The following should appear in the setup.py for the py2exe build:

import tinycc

data_files = []
...
data_files.extend(tinycc.data_files())
...
setup(
    ...
    data_files = data_files,
    ...
    )

Note: if you have put tcc.exe somewhere unusual (i.e., not in the tinycc package and not in tinycc-data next to the py2exe generated library or exe), then you can set the environment variable TCC_ROOT to the directory containing tcc.exe.

Release Notes

2017-11-20 R 1.1

• support distutils build of python packages

2016-05-31 R 1.0.2

• support build of DLLs for windows 32 and windows 64