CCCC

CCCC (C**omprehensive **C **C**ompensation **C**ompiler) compiles C to bytecode and runs it in a built-in VM. It is a drop-in frontend for cc, clang and gcc: a compile-time pass between the preprocessor and the parser runs [[cccc::comptime]] functions and expands their results, and -c=native hands the result to a host compiler.

This site documents the public headers. The user guides live in docs/.

Headers

Header	Use it to	Guide
cccc/building.h	Write --build scripts: targets, profiles, cross-compilation	build
cccc/reflection.h	Write comptime macros: inspect, build and quote AST nodes	macros
cccc/testing.h	Write [[cccc::test]] tests with the Assert* macros	testing
cccc/kernel.h	Launch [[cccc::kernel]] functions over a grid of work-items	kernels
omp.h	Call the OpenMP runtime API under -fopenmp	openmp
cccc/opencl.h	Read OpenCL C 1.2 kernels (.cl, -x cl) onto the kernel model	opencl
cccc/derive.h	Generate serializers, accessors, equality, JSON and more with attributes such as @serialize and @to_json	derive
cccc/json.h	Runtime behind @to_json / @from_json; include it next to derive.h	derive

testing.h, building.h and opencl.h are injected automatically in their modes. reflection.h is available to comptime code without an include. derive.h and json.h are ordinary includes; they have no generated reference pages, so use the guide.

Build scripts

A build.c script declares targets with the Builder API of building.h: each target is a function returning a BuildTarget *, run with cccc --build build.c --build-target=<name>. CCCC's own build.c is a working example, and its docs target builds this site.

Example

@comptime Node *square(Node *x) { return Quote("($1) * ($1)", x); }
 
int main(void) { return square(6); }   // 36, folded at compile time

cccc demo.c                    # run in the VM
cccc -c=native demo.c -o demo  # lower to C and build with the host compiler