Re: [Tinycc-devel] [PATCH] Add support for reading thin archive files.

[Reimar Döffinger]

> On 30 Oct 2023, at 10:07, gz8cx4@0w.se wrote:
> 
> On Mon, Oct 30, 2023 at 08:41:13AM +0100, Reimar Döffinger wrote:
>> My reason for implementing it is compatibility.
>> Quite a few projects will default to thin archives, and if you configure them
>> for CC=tcc they will fail to compile because of it.
>> They test for ar support of thin archives, but I don't think any of them
>> test if the compiler supports it...
> 
> This looks to me like bugs in the corresponding projects?..
> (we shouldn't put code into tcc to work around someone else's *bugs*)

Checking for every single possible thing in the build system isn't
very sensible either.
I would say it's simply that they did not see the need for such a
check, given all mainstream compilers support this.
How far does tcc want to go in aligning with mainstream compilers?
A similar example is that tcc exits when specifying -l with -c,
is it strictly correct? Yes.
Does it make sense? It seems like it makes it hard to compile existing
programs using tcc for no real benefit.
Not sure if there is a project vision here on what the goal is?

>> Though maybe just detecting thin archives (instead of just saying that
>> the format is not recognized) and printing instructions may work well enough
>> as an alternative.
> 
> This can be a practical compromise.
> 
> Still, as far as personal opinions matter, I would prefer this to be
> put into the documentation rather than into the code.

Well, my personal opinion is that I am quite strongly against
just documenting something when the program could trivially be
helpful and tell the user what they did wrong.
Because the number of users that will have read the documentation
and still remember it (or get lucky searching it) tends to be limited.
Also, someone needs to write and maintain the documentation, and
as of now the documentation does not even have a section about "porting"
existing software to tcc.
So I rate the success chances of that approach as rather low.

Anyway this is not something that is super important to me, it just
seemed something I hoped might be a trivial improvement.
Which it was not quite, thus why I sent it to the list first :)

Best regards,
Reimar