PCC: Portable C Compiler Isn't Quick To Advance

The Portable C Compiler 1.0 was released in April of 2011, but since then there hasn't been many updates out of this open-source compiler that was originally spawned in the late 1970's.

The PCC web-site remains rather basic with not much information and the latest news is last year's 1.0 release. The only information since that I've been able to find is that they do have limited C++ support going into PCC for the past few months, but the support is still very limited. The main language for the Portable C Compiler is C99. At the project's current development pace, don't expect C11 or C++11 coverage any time soon. And for supporting all of the latest instruction set extensions on the latest ARM and Intel CPUs, guess again.

The PCC mailing list sees up to a couple dozen emails per month, but that's still very dry in comparison to GCC or LLVM/Clang. The project's code remains housed in CVS.

I bring up PCC again since a few days ago I was trying to run some new Portable C Compiler benchmarks compared to LLVM/Clang and GCC. Unfortunately that didn't go so well with nearly all of the C test profiles failing to build properly under the latest PCC CVS code.

The limited Portable C Compiler 1.1 devel 20120626, GCC 4.7, LLVM/Clang 3.0 benchmarks can be found on OpenBenchmarking.org. Hopefully you're not holding your breath waiting for PCC to advance.