February 7, 2026
100KB, infinite opinions
Tiny C Compiler
The 100KB cult classic people love, mourn, and revive
TLDR: Tiny C Compiler is no longer maintained by its creator, but fans point to active forks keeping it alive. Commenters split between nostalgic love, gripes about bloated tools, and wild stories of professors banning GCC, while hackers praise TCC’s tiny size and browser-friendly tricks.
Old-school coders just spit out their coffee: the beloved Tiny C Compiler (TCC) page flatly says the creator isn’t working on it anymore, and the comments turned into a nostalgia rave. One user sighed over today’s mega-sized tools, joking that installing Microsoft’s suite feels like a workout, while TCC was once about 100KB. Imagine an app that fits on a floppy and still compiles real programs—people are wiping tears and gigabytes.
Then the plot twist: “It’s not dead!” Fans rushed in with active forks and mirrors adding new chips like RISC‑V. Cue the debate: is TCC a museum piece or a living legend? The speedheads reminded everyone of those old claims—about 9x faster than GCC (the big, official GNU C Compiler) on a vintage Pentium 4—sparking cheeky “back in my day” memes. Even skeptics admitted the tiny tool has party tricks: run C like a script, or mix in its optional safety checks.
The juiciest drama came from a war story: one student said their professor banned GCC and made the whole class use TCC. Meanwhile, modern tinkerers gushed it’s “very hackable,” even compiling to WASM (WebAssembly) for in‑browser antics. Verdict from the crowd: tiny tool, huge feelings—and a community eager to keep it alive with forks, fixes, and flair.
Key Points
- •The author states they are no longer working on TCC and directs users to the mailing list for updates.
- •TCC is a small (~100KB x86 executable) and fast C compiler that includes preprocessor, assembler, and linker.
- •Features include native x86 code generation, optional memory/bounds checking, C script execution via shebang, and libtcc for dynamic code generation.
- •Benchmark on the Links Browser project shows TCC 0.9.22 compiling about nine times faster than GCC 3.2 -O0 on a 2.4 GHz Pentium 4.
- •TCC is available via Savannah, has online documentation, and is distributed under the GNU LGPL; related resources and projects are linked.