Comment by einpoklum
18 days ago
An interesting use case - for the compiler as-is or for the essentiall idea of barely-C - might be in bootstrapping chains, i.e. starting from tiny platform-specific binaries one could verify the disassembly of, and gradually building more complex tools, interpreters, and compiler, so that eventually you get to something like a version of GCC and can then build an entire OS distribution.
Examples:
Related: the stage0/stage1 series of hex-to-c compiler bootstrapping tools https://github.com/oriansj/stage0?tab=readme-ov-file and OTCC https://bellard.org/otcc/
You may enjoy https://github.com/ludocode/onramp
It would be interesting to understand what non-toy programs can be coded in this subset of C. For example, could tcc be rewritten in this dialect?
https://bootstrapping.miraheze.org/wiki/Main_Page
(Why does the referenced short story remind me of "There Is No Antimemetics Division"?)