The way hashing is used for tokens and for making a pseudo symbol table is such an elegant idea.
fix4fun•Feb 7, 2026
I think the same. Really nice project and good trick with hashing tokens.
PS. There left 21 bytes (21 * 0x00 - from 0x01e0 to 0x01fd). Maybe something can be packed there ;)
xorvoid•Feb 7, 2026
I may be the author.. enjoy! It was an absolute blast making this!
veltas•Feb 7, 2026
This is very nice. I'm currently writing a minimalist C compiler although my goal isn't fitting in a boot sector, it's more targeted at 8-bit systems with a lot more room than that.
This is a great demonstration of how simple the bare bones of C are, which I think is one reason I and many others find it so appealing despite how Spartan it is. C really evolved from B which was a demake of Fortran, if Ken Thompson is to be trusted.
JamesTRexx•Feb 7, 2026
Would and how much would it shrink when if, while, and for were replaced by the simple goto routine? (after all, in assembly there is only jmp and no other fancy jump instruction (I assume) ).
And PS, it's "chose your own adventure". :-)
I love minimalism.
SAI_Peregrinus•Feb 7, 2026
What fancy jumps are present in assembly depends on the CPU architecture. But there are always conditional jumps, like JNZ that jumps if the Zero flag isn't set.
einpoklum•Feb 7, 2026
An interesting use case - for the compiler as-is or for the essentiall idea of barely-C - might be in bootstrapping chains, i.e. starting from tiny platform-specific binaries one could verify the disassembly of, and gradually building more complex tools, interpreters, and compiler, so that eventually you get to something like a version of GCC and can then build an entire OS distribution.
> I wrote a fairly straight-forward and minimalist lexer and it took >150 lines of C code
was it supposed to be "<150"?
owalt•Feb 7, 2026
They're saying the naive implementation was more than 150 lines of C code (300-450 bytes), i.e. too big.
mojuba•Feb 7, 2026
Compare that to the C compiler in 100,000 lines written by Claude in two weeks for $20,000 (I think was posted on HN just yesterday)
vidarh•Feb 7, 2026
It's a fun comparison, but with the notable difference that that one can compile the Linux kernel and generate code for multiple different architectures, while this one can only compile a small proportion of valid C. It's a great project, but it's not so much a C compiler, as a compiler for a subset of C that allows all programs this compiler can compile to also be compiled by an actual C compiler, but not vice versa.
d_silin•Feb 7, 2026
But can it compile "Hello, World" example from its own README.md?
Oh, it looks like my X86-16 boot sector C compiler that I made recently [1]. Writing boot sector games has a nostalgic magic to it, when programming was actually fun and showed off your skills. It's a shame that the AI era has terribly devalued these projects.
9 Comments
Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36064971
PS. There left 21 bytes (21 * 0x00 - from 0x01e0 to 0x01fd). Maybe something can be packed there ;)
This is a great demonstration of how simple the bare bones of C are, which I think is one reason I and many others find it so appealing despite how Spartan it is. C really evolved from B which was a demake of Fortran, if Ken Thompson is to be trusted.
And PS, it's "chose your own adventure". :-) I love minimalism.
Examples:
https://github.com/cosinusoidally/mishmashvm/
and https://github.com/cosinusoidally/tcc_bootstrap_alt/
was it supposed to be "<150"?
https://github.com/anthropics/claudes-c-compiler/issues/1
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46920922 discussion.
[1] https://github.com/Mati365/ts-c-compiler