This person seems to have greenspun themselves a JIT.

> It is difficult to get the boundary right between code which can and cannot be dynamically loaded. This is the same issue with using embedded dynamic scripting languages like Lua or Python—how much of your application should be written in them?

All of it.

> JIT compilation requires generating machine code, which is usually a complex process and a large maintenance burden. In practice this means shipping out to a 3rd party library for JIT, and the libraries are typically very large dependencies.

Is a c compiler not a large dependency and a maintenance burden?

lelanthran

> Is a c compiler not a large dependency and a maintenance burden?

Not in my experience, unless you feel that 577KB is a large dependency.

For size, ship TinyCC(100kb, also available as a `libcc.so` or `libcc.dll`) and a small stdlib (377kb for musl) with your app and you're done.

For the maintenance issue, it's not different from depending on any other library, except that TinyCC and/or Musl are incredibly more mature than any other library you are bound to use (with the exception of SQLite).

moonchild

TinyCC is not heavier than would be a JIT generating code of comparable quality. And as for maturity: I have used tcc. It is buggy and lacks useful features.

As a point of comparison: luajit is 600k, and unlike tcc, it actually generates good code.

raible

I have found the libtcc from https://github.com/TinyCC/tinycc to be absolutely fantastic. I'm using it to instantaneously compile the C output from my hobby language to create a repl. Once I had the compiler in good shape it allowed me to create a 100% compatible interpreter for (basically) free.

The libtcc API is minimal. For my needs that has been 100% sufficient and a pleasure to work with.