Op 02-10-2025 om 08:41 schreef Hubert Kauker:
I am trying to find out whether tcc is a good alternative to cc and
gcc on a Mac.
It will be fine for me to have all of ANSI C (C89/C90), much of the
C99 ISO standard, and many GNU C extensions including inline assembly.
So I cloned from repo.or.cz/tinycc.git
<http://repo.or.cz/tinycc.git> and followed the instructions.
I was able able to build the following version:
tcc version 0.9.28rc 2025-09-21 mob@ba0899d9 (x86_64 Darwin)
Fine. But “make test” obviously ran into 2 issues. Here is the output:
/Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/usr/bin/codesign_allocate:
fatal error: file not in an order that can be processed (symbol
table out of place): /Users/hubert/Documents/Git/C/tinycc/tests/hello
hello: the codesign_allocate helper tool cannot be found or used
tcc: error: command failed 'codesign -f -s - hello'
+ ../tcc -vv
tcc version 0.9.28rc 2025-09-21 mob@ba0899d9 (x86_64 Darwin)
install: /usr/local/lib/tcc
include:
/usr/local/lib/tcc/include
/usr/local/include
/Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/SDKs/MacOSX10.15.sdk/usr/include
libraries:
/usr/local/lib/tcc
/usr/lib
/lib
/usr/local/lib
/Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/SDKs/MacOSX.sdk/usr/lib
libtcc1:
/usr/local/lib/tcc/libtcc1.a
+ otool -L ../tcc
../tcc:
/usr/lib/libSystem.B.dylib (compatibility version 1.0.0, current
version 1281.100.1)
+ exit 1
make[2]: *** [hello-exe] Error 1
make[1]: *** [all] Error 2
make: *** [test] Error 2
The first message seems to say that my codesign_allocate tool is not
suitable. Both codesign and codesign_allocate are in /usr/bin and can
be found.
QUESTION 1:
What is wrong and what can I do about it?
However, changing into the examples folder, I can use “tcc -run” on
ex1.c to get “Hello world”. Fine. But omitting “-run” produces the
same error about codesign_allocate as above.
After searching for OSX in the changelog, I found the following remark
about version 0.9.26:
/Support OSX (tcc -run only) (Milutin Jovanovic)/
Strange. What does it mean?
QUESTION 2:
Does it mean that tcc does not fully support OSX - it’s
experimental? TCC cannot produce native OSX executables?
Is this state of affairs still officially present in the current
0.9.28rc?
Then I noticed that tcc is also available via Homebrew. Now, “brew
install tcc” tells me:
*Fetching downloads for: **tcc*
Warning:tcc has been deprecated because it is not supported
upstream! It will be disabled on 2026-09-16.
==>*Downloading
https://ghcr.io/v2/homebrew/core/tcc/manifests/0.9.27_1*
…
==>*Fetching **tcc*
==>*Downloading
https://ghcr.io/v2/homebrew/core/tcc/blobs/sha256:68930891a8746b*
*…*
==>*Pouring tcc--0.9.27_1.catalina.bottle.tar.gz*
🍺 /usr/local/Cellar/tcc/0.9.27_1: 20 files, 723.7KB
==>*Running `brew cleanup tcc`**…*
*…*
==>*No outdated dependents to upgrade!*
*
*
QUESTION 3:
What is that about being deprecated, not being supported upstream
and being disabled from 2026-09-16? Is that serious?
After that I have:*
*
tcc version 0.9.27 (x86_64 Darwin)
Fine. Now back to examples and “tcc -run ex1.c” producing “Hello
world”. Fine.
But “tcc ex1.c” this time produces:
tcc: error: file 'crt1.o' not found
tcc: error: file 'crti.o' not found
/usr/lib/libc.dylib: error: bad architecture
tcc: error: library 'c' not found
tcc: error: file 'crtn.o' not found
tcc: error: undefined symbol ‘printf'
So it seems, I didn’t make much progress.
QUESTION 4:
How should I go on from here?
From the output of otool you probably run on a apple 10 system (google
search).
You can check this by sw_vers command.
Perhaps you can try playing with configure options:
--config-new_macho=no|yes
--config-codesign=no
tcc does support osx and has been tested on osx >= 10.
There is a small incompatibility. The object files (.o) files are in elf
format.
The final executable or shared library are in osx format.
Herman
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