Find me in the starry night

October 8, 2025 - Modern C development!

I've been working on a toy programming language written in C for the last few days. C can be a very annoying language to work with but I really like Nic Barker's videos on modern C development. There's a lot of good ideas and research in them that's been kind of rekindling my interest in using it as a language!

One tidbit of information is that you can avoid using a build system by just including all of the source code in a single file. So instead of compiling multiple *.c files to *.o files and linking, you just compile a single main.c file that includes all others directly into a binary.

So my main.c file looks like this:

#include <yeah/src.inc>

int main() {
    ...
}
                

And then I have a file called yeah/src.inc that looks like this:

#pragma once

#include <yeah/array.c>
#include <yeah/code.c>
#include <yeah/error.c>
#include <yeah/instruction.c>
#include <yeah/io.c>
#include <yeah/lexer.c>
#include <yeah/log.c>
#include <yeah/machine.c>
#include <yeah/math.c>
#include <yeah/stack.c>
#include <yeah/value.c>
                

Apparently, code actually compiles faster this way as opposed to using a build system. The main con is that there's no easy caching of unchanged files this way.

I'm going to have to switch over to using a build system - probably Meson - but until then I have nice fast compilations with a single shell command:

gcc --std=gnu11 -O0 -g -Wall -Werror -Wextra -Isrc \
    src/yeah/main.c -o yeah
                

And it takes 70ms (although I do have an M4 Max cause I'm a whore for expensive tech lol).