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free comandline c compilers for free game development

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Started by fir September 15, 2013 11:30 AM

6 comments, last by Vikato 10 years, 8 months ago

fir

-460

Author

September 15, 2013 11:30 AM

I was using (testing) four small c compilers to produce some winapi apps:

- lcc

- mingw

- dmc

- old borland 551

they were working but I am always not sure if they are free and can be usted for totally free development (are they?) - also I always like to know a wide spectrum of possibilities so could someone add something free to that list

it not must be a new compiler but should be free for any usage and able to compile winapi apps, prefereably small - it could only compile c code or c-like subset of c++

Brother Bob

10,350

September 15, 2013 11:46 AM

Depending on where you draw the line for "small", Microsoft's compiler that ships with Visual Studio and the Windows SDK (except the Windows 8 SDK, apparently) is a stand alone command line compiler. The biggest part seems to be the static runtime libraries, weighing in at a few 10's of MB for each of the variants, but I suppose you can chose not to use all of them.

kop0113

2,466

September 15, 2013 01:59 PM

There is also clang (and clang++).

http://clang.llvm.org/

Download for 64bit Windows:

gcc base

clang overlay

You mentioned mingw which is basically a port of GCC to Windows, so I might also mention Cygwin which is another port (and much more) of GCC.

Among those compilers, the most free is Clang (BSD licensed) followed closely by GCC/Mingw (GPL-licensed) so since you would be using these two compilers rather than distributing them, neither of them would restrict you in the slightest.

http://tinyurl.com/shewonyay - Thanks so much for those who voted on my GF's Competition Cosplay Entry for Cosplayzine. She won! I owe you all beers :)

Mutiny - Open-source C++ Unity re-implementation.
Defile of Eden 2 - FreeBSD and OpenBSD binaries of our latest game.

Norman Barrows

7,180

September 15, 2013 02:39 PM

probably the coolest thing MS ever did for little guy game devs was add the compiler optimizations games need to the free version of VS C++. support for fastcall, omitting frame pointers, etc. This was the nail in the coffin for Watcom C. so now there's really no excuse NOT to use MS VS express. Like all true commercial grade compilers, it comes with command line versions of make, compiler, linker, and all the other usual tools. And of course its 100% free, just a huge DL. docs are online only though! : (

Norm Barrows

Rockland Software Productions

"Building PC games since 1989"

rocklandsoftware.net

PLAY CAVEMAN NOW!

http://rocklandsoftware.net/beta.php

deftware

1,778

September 15, 2013 04:26 PM

My favorite is Fabrice Bellard's TinyC Compiler (aka TCC).. http://bellard.org/tcc/

Otherwise, for larger more serious projects that have better win32 API support I use mingw, even though some peripheral things are still problematic to get working, like the video for windows API (VFW).

PeterStock

823

September 15, 2013 05:02 PM

MinGW (GCC) is free in both senses of the word (beer and freedom). The GPL licence only restricts you if you want to modify the compiler code itself; if you just use it to compile a program, you're free to do whatever you want with your program. Same with all compilers I would imagine.

kop0113

2,466

September 15, 2013 07:32 PM

And a few others I have come across over the years.

1) Intel C/C++ Compiler (icc) - Also have a version for free that cross compiles to x86 Android

2) TenDRA (was an old choice for an official FreeBSD C++ compiler)

3) Solaris Studio C/C++ - Linux / Solaris only but has a fantastic profiler and debugger dbx <3

4) Codeplay - Not one for indies (and not free for commercial use) but has a fantastic feature to use a preprocessor directive to offload code to the SPU on a PS3 (kinda in a similar fashion to OpenMP).

C/C++ Interpreters

picoc - Quite a light embeddable (C only) interpreter.

CERN root - Heavier but really powerful. We use this for scripting our build server.

Vikato

174

September 15, 2013 08:09 PM

Pelles C? comes with an IDE, but all build tools are command line. C only.

Manufacturing metaphores in my melancholy mind.

free comandline c compilers for free game development

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free comandline c compilers for free game development

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