features

The primary goals of nwcc currently are portability and correctness. Due to the amount of required work, many tradeoffs are necessary. As a result of many tradeoffs and compromises, neither nwcc's portability nor its correctness seem particularly impressive for the time being - But stay tuned, things will only get better!

• The currently supported architectures are x86, AMD64, SPARC, MIPS and PowerPC. ARM is going to join this list some time soon, possibly followed by other embedded architectures or PA-RISC within the next year
• Cross-compilation is supported (but not heavily tested!)
• nwcc implements most of C90 (ISO C), though various language constructs that are particularly obscure, rarely used and/or of dubious usefulness are not yet implemented, or implemented in a broken way - see the bugs page for details
• Various GNU C and C99 features are also supported, such as

  The long long type

  inline/restrict keywords (ignored)

  typeof()/alignof()

  computed gotos

  __func__/__PRETTY_FUNCTION__

  flexible array members

  compound literals and designated initializers

  (very incomplete single-dimensional) VLA support

  statements as expressions

  mixed declarations and code

  builtin stdarg functions

  builtin alloca()

  gcc style inline assembly (only on x86 and AMD64)

• The x86 and AMD64 backends support two assemblers; nasm/yasm and gas. This can be useful for side-by-side assembler syntax comparison
• nwcc can already generate many useful warnings, in some cases more so than gcc
• There is basic support for PIC (position-independent code) and TLS (thread-local storage)
• Various other little (mostly half-baked) features, such as very basic stack overflow protection (x86/AMD64-only), primitive function call trace instrumentation (similar to ltrace, x86-only), colored warning/error messages