Now with the instructions followed, I ran the compiler driver, vc, and was swiftly greeted with the message No config file!.

That turned out to have been a good idea. I suppose I could have done a system-wide installation and not had to do this setup, but I figured I might have to be rebuilding vbcc a lot and so until I was sure it worked well, this made more sense. Running vbccįollowing the instructions from the documentation, I added the following to my ksh. Building vbccĪfter extracting (with GNU tar since it appears subtly broken when using OpenBSD tar), I entered the vbcc directory and ran:Īnd that was enough to build the compiler. I did submit these changes as patches to the author, so hopefully it will be updated soon. Out of deference to the license, I will describe but not provide changes I made to vbcc to get it working on OpenBSD. Please keep in mind that vbcc is source-available but is not open source. I also tried out vasm but if you'd rather use GNU as, that will work just fine. vbcc itself for i386 outputs GNU as compatible assembly files so you only need the vbcc compiler.

There is also vasm, the retargetable assembler, and vlink, the linker. The vbcc system is a complete system and not just a compiler. My Mac mini G4 needs a replacement hard drive, so I grabbed an old netbook that was going unused and installed OpenBSD/i386 on it. Therefore, my options were limited to i386 or macppc. While OpenBSD still supports alpha, I don't own one ( editor's note: Do you have an unused alpha you want to get rid of? Get in touch with me!). Unfortunately, amd64 is not one of the CPUs vbcc supports in fact, the only 64-bit CPU it lists support for is alpha. Interestingly, vbcc supports all classes of CPUs from 8-bit to 64-bit and even the Infocom Z-machine. vbcc is a C99 compiler that targets a good number of platforms.

I first learned about vbcc from a Ben Eater video. The primary reason is that every C compiler has the potential to find issues vbcc was no exception as it found at least a style nit if not a small bug in oksh. You might be wondering why I am so aggressive to test and support oksh with every C compiler I can get my hands on. I will discuss how I got vbcc running on OpenBSD, how I got oksh building and working with vbcc, and my overall review of using the vbcc compiler. Today, I added support for the vbcc compiler to oksh, my portable version of the in-base OpenBSD Korn shell. Supporting a new C compiler for oksh and review of the vbcc C compiler

Neat video internal error