2020-06-19

Discovered a really cool tool today I'll be using for C development/prototyping.
It's called picoC and tries to be a very minimal C interpreter written
in only 3500 lines of C.

I use it primarily for prototyping and experimenting with C without having to
recompile and run a program every time I want to see a change.

For example, if I'm a complete beginner and want to know what value the EOF
constant has, I can simply fire up picoC and write 

printf("%d", EOF);

to get my answer.

I actually started looking for a program like this after watching someone
do a project in Haskell using the GHCi compiler, an interactive compiler
for the language.

GHCi lets you recompile the program while in the interpreter and from there
interact with the program. This makes it much easier to debug the program.
Ever since I saw GHCi in use, I've wanted something similar for the language
I'm learning, C. picoC doesn't quite fulfill this role, but it sure is useful
for prototyping and testings stuff out.

GDB, the GNU debugger, looks to be approximately what I want, but I find it
to be extremely buggy, ironically.

built with sh(1) and cat(1)