Interactive GCC (igcc) is a read-eval-print loop (REPL) for C/C++

https://github.com/alexandru-dinu/igcc

by pr337h4m • 3 years ago

170 69 3 years ago

github.com

xvilka• 3 years ago

Similar to Cling[1] from ROOT.

[1] https://github.com/root-project/cling

Conscat• 3 years ago

Cling has been largely upstreamed as `clang-repl`. All distributions of clang+tools has it now, and unlike Cling this supports the latest Clang features. However Cling still has some special features for GPGPU that `clang-repl` doesn't.

whizzter2• 3 years ago

Great to hear, I had to build cling myself a some years before the pandemic for a classroom and each and every time it was a race with A/V software starting to trigger everything when X number of people started running a "new" executable.

mbwgh• 3 years ago

Interesting to see that I had a C++ REPL on my system, installed with clang by default, all along.

From the documentation, it seems this is primarily aimed at incremental compilation on demand via Compiler As A Service.

Indeed, for an end-user, calling this a REPL seems to be a stretch. There's no auto-completion or special commands like showing docs or the checking the type of things, you even have to #include <iostream> to manually print the results of simple expressions.

So I guess read-eval-loop would be more fitting :)

asvitkine• 3 years ago

Nice! TIL.

Exciting to see this upstream - something I didn't get around to with ccons which was one of the early prototypes of this built on top of clang (2009). Back then clang C++ support was still being worked on, so ccons targetted C. Later, I collaborated a bit with the Cling folks who I think did take some inspiration from some of my approaches (and likely some of the clang/llvm changes that I landed upstream for supporting functionality / bug fixes). Exiting to see this in the tree now!

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/asvitkine/ccons/master/doc...

hkwerf• 3 years ago

The odd part is that this is not just for fun. For many physicists when I was at CERN, a C++ REPL was a commonly used tool to interactively debug analyses to such a degree that many never compiled their code. Back then, I believe, it was some custom implementation included in ROOT (https://root.cern/). I even went out of my way to write C++ code compatible to it just so it could run in that custom C++ REPL implementation, otherwise some colleagues weren't interested in collaborating at all.

pjmlp5• 3 years ago

As CERN alummi I can attest the same for ATLAS TDAQ folks already in 2003.

agoose77• 3 years ago

Yes, before CLING there was CINT!

nologic012• 3 years ago

I have a vague sense that in the era of ML/AI hype and the complex Python/C++ stack that makes it all possible, Cling and the ROOT project should somehow be more visible? Is the project missing some VC driven marketing?

whizzter2• 3 years ago

People who hype things use Python for coordination and most gruntwork is done by the GPU or C++ libraries anyhow so C++ doesn't help that much in the big picture. (And hype-people probably often aren't technical enough for C++)

cozzyd• 3 years ago

And then there's cppyy, also with ROOT heritage... https://cppyy.readthedocs.io/en/latest/history.html

westurner2• 3 years ago

Xeus-cling is a Jupyter Kernel for C/C++: https://github.com/jupyter-xeus/xeus-cling#a-c-notebook

With the xeus-cling Jupyter Kernel for C/C++, variable redefinitions in subsequent notebook input cells do not raise a compiler warning or error.

There's JsRoot, which may already work with JupyterLite in WASM in a browser tab?

There's a ROOT kernel for Jupyter, too: https://github.com/root-project/root/tree/master/bindings/ju...

Instead of the ROOT Jupyter Kernel, you can just call into ROOT from Python with PyRoot (from a notebook that specifies e.g. ipykernel, xeus-python, or pyodide Jupyter kernels).

"ROOT has its Jupyter Kernel!" (2015) https://root.cern/blog/root-has-its-jupyter-kernel/

IDK if there are Apache Arrow bindings for ROOT?; though there certainly are for C/C++, Python, and other languages

You must install jupyter_console to use Jupyter kernels from the CLI like IPython with ipykernel.

In addition to IPython/Jupyter notebook, jupyterlab, vscode, and vscode.dev+devpod;

awesome-cpp#debug: https://github.com/fffaraz/awesome-cpp#debug

"Debugging a Mixed Python and C Language Stack" (2023) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35710350

ROOT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ROOT

"Root: CERN's scientific data analysis framework for C++" (2019) because if PyRoot to C++ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20691614 :

`conda install -c conda-forge -y root jupyterlab jupyter_console xeus-cling jupyterlite`

SymPy's lambdify() doesn't support ROOT but does support many other ML and NN frameworks; From "Stem formulas" (2023) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36839748 :

sympy.utilities.lambdify.lambdify() https://github.com/sympy/sympy/blob/a76b02fcd3a8b7f79b3a88df... :
> """Convert a SymPy expression into a function that allows for fast numeric evaluation [e.g. the CPython math module, mpmath, NumPy, SciPy, CuPy, JAX, TensorFlow, SymPy, numexpr,]

westurner2• 3 years ago

JsRoot in JupyterLab

"jsroot and JupyterLab" https://github.com/root-project/jsroot/issues/166

JupyterLite docs > Create a custom kernel: https://jupyterlite.readthedocs.io/en/stable/howto/extension...

`jupyter lite` builds a set of packages into WASM WebAssembly with emscripten empack.

JupyterLite docs > Configuring the pyodide kernel > Adding wheels https://jupyterlite.readthedocs.io/en/stable/howto/index.htm...

Vscode.dev also supports the pyodide kernel.

Does `pip install root` work in JupyterLite (in the pyodide Python kernel)? Probably not because root is not a plain python package.

- [ ] Create emscripten-forge recipes for JsRoot and root, so that root is usable with the pyodide kernel supported by JupyterLite and pyodide

emscripten-forge recipes are compiled, packaged, and hosted.

emscripten-forge/recipes//recipes/recipes_emscripten/picomamba/recipe.yaml: https://github.com/emscripten-forge/recipes/blob/main/recipe...

asicsp• 3 years ago

Discussions for Cling: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

LoganDark• 3 years ago

I used to use Cling on macOS back in 2018 or so. It was really cool for the time.

pwdisswordfishc2• 3 years ago

The real deal, or is it yet another one of those Potemkin REPLs that append code to a temporary file, compile it and diff standard output?

rany_• 3 years ago

Writes to a temporary file and compiles it: https://github.com/alexandru-dinu/igcc/blob/84f68c7056d0d996...

codeflo• 3 years ago

The ethics discussion in the neighboring threads aside, this approach has some nasty surprises, and I think it's borderline deceptive that they aren't mentioned more prominently.

It's not that rare that my REPL sessions e.g. in Node are

perform expensive computation

... result ...

transform result

... transformed result ...

With this approach, the REPL slows down quadratically with session length, and any expensive command at the beginning is executed over and over again.

Also, better don't do any file I/O and then continue the session unless you're prepared for the consequences.

guyrap• 3 years ago

Compiling diffs - but if the user experience is REPL-ish and it can help some people learn the _basics_ of the language, what's wrong with that?

(Wrong as in "murdering puppies" wrong, not as in "here are the downsides of X" which I believe exist for every X.)

pwdisswordfishc2• 3 years ago

The inefficiency of that process increases electricity usage, the carbon footprint, and therefore contributes to climate change. Which, eventually, murders puppies.

Good enough for your arbitrary standard? I would have thought the fact that all preceding side effects will be re-executed each time a new line is written is bad enough, but whatever.

heresie-dabord• 3 years ago

what's wrong with that?

Why nothing at all, of course. A REPL need not be more than a way to test and explore syntax, functions, and logical structures.

the user experience is REPL-ish and it can help some people learn the _basics_ of the language

PREPLISH exists for Perl ^_^

https://github.com/viviparous/preplish

LukeShu• 3 years ago

This should perhaps have "(2009)" in the title; it is a fork of http://www.artificialworlds.net/wiki/IGCC/IGCC . Andy Balaam worked on the original IGCC 2009, 2012. Alexandru Dina worked on this fork 2018-2021. The fork seems to be mostly minor modernization, and adding color.

It works by compiling and re-running the whole session each time and assuming that it only printed `n` bytes last time but printed `n+m` bytes this time, that it should only show the user the newest `m` bytes.

jandrese• 3 years ago

How does it handle side effects? If I open a file in append mode, write some bytes, then close the file does it continue to grow while I work on later things?

loeg3• 3 years ago

Not well.

nverno• 3 years ago

It keeps growing, sending all the bytes again for each eval.

xigoi3• 3 years ago

This should not be called a REPL, but a RACRDL (Read-Append-Compile-Run-Diff Loop).

kookamamie• 3 years ago

using namespace std;

Good god.

xdavidliu• 3 years ago

Hey Bjarne Stroustrup himself uses it in his "C++ Language Book", so it must be fine. /s

mpixel• 3 years ago

I'm not a C++ programmer, could you explain why this is a bad idea?

CyberDildonics6• 3 years ago

If it's in a header file it imports the namespace into everything else. People make a big deal about it even though most of the time it isn't. If it is isolated to a compilation unit it's fine.

xigoi3• 3 years ago

How else would you know that “cout” is std::cout and not some other cout? /s

jupiterelastica• 3 years ago

Is it possible integrate this in a notebook environment? This would be amazing for teaching C/C++.

pjmlp5• 3 years ago

Check Xeus, https://github.com/jupyter-xeus/xeus

assbuttbuttass• 3 years ago

gdb has always been my go-to repl for C/C++

cassepipe• 3 years ago

Yes I remember when implementing AA_tree in C++ I was able to call on demand my AA_tree class helper function that would output the tree state to a dot file and I was able to see the tree schema update live. Pretty amazing.

percentcer• 3 years ago

Coming to C++ from python had me looking for something like this for a long time, but I've come to embrace my little single-file "replit.sln" which has proven to be much more flexible anyway.

not2b• 3 years ago

Perhaps noise and wasted compile attempts could be reduced by having a simple counting mechanism for {}, (), and []. This wouldn't be correct if the program uses macros with unbalanced characters, but that's rare, so I suppose it would suffice to allow the user to turn it off.

So a compile wouldn't be attempted if there are obvious unbalanced braces.

loeg3• 3 years ago

Compile errors can be tolerated until the code works

Huh, that's not really great. You kind of want (1) the REPL to be syntax-aware, and not feed loops into the compiler until they're syntactically complete (with a multi-line editor) and (2) to reject input that causes the overall program to fail to compile.

trn• 3 years ago

I'll give an unpaid plug to https://www.softintegration.com/ for their Ch product, which is beyond excellent (and has existed for a very long time.) Clang-Repl/Cling is, however, nice to see, especially as it is open source.

Interactive GCC (igcc) is a read-eval-print loop (REPL) for C/C++

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