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