TCC 0.9.25

I worked on porting TCC into x86-64 and the project has recently released a new version which contains my changes.

http://bellard.org/tcc/

I confirmed that my changes pass the tests in TCC and successfully compile some applications such as link and Lua.

As there should be some bugs in the x86-64 support, I'll be really appreciated if you try this release with x86-64 and report bugs.

Regarding implementation... It was more difficult than I expected. Code generation for x86-64 was relatively straightforward because there was support for x86, which is similar to x86-64. The most difficult part was relocation related stuff. As distance of two addresses in 64bit address space can be larger than 32bit, some 32bit relative references need to be fixed by PLT and GOT. TCC's -run mode support was also tricky by the same reason.

Other things by which I was often confused were 64bit system itself. As much code of TCC depends on 32bit system, sometimes it casts pointers into int, which is sometimes incorrect on 64bit system. The following simple code would show the difficulty of 64bit system:

int main() {
    printf("%p\n", malloc(10));
    printf("%p\n", malloc(1000000));
}

This code produces outputs like

0xfa1010
0x7f3658acd010

on my linux box. When we allocate small memory chunk from heap, it returns addresses which is smaller than INT_MAX. So, even if we cast the returned pointer into 32bit integer, it has no problem as long as we allocate small memory chunks. This hided many bugs from me. This kind of bugs only appears with big programs. It means that it's difficult to create minimal failure cases...