The Flash C Compiler Revives the Turbo C Era
A Hacker News discussion of The Flash C Compiler, a small C compiler that brings back the feel of Turbo C. Commenters nostalgic for QuickBASIC, Turbo Pascal, and Turbo C are intrigued, though one notes that without a linker, external libraries are off the table—leaving you with single-header libraries, which a fully C89-compliant compiler could still handle.
The only bummer I'm seeing with fcc is not having a linker mean not being able to use external libraries.
- ndiddy
I looked at the Github page and of course it's vibe coded. This is the sort of project that someone would have spent a few months doing as a learning exercise while they were reading through something like Crenshaw's "Let's Build a Compiler" series. I don't see the point of vibe coding it. You still end up with a toy compiler that nobody will actually use, except now you haven't learned anything about how compilers work. It's pointless.
- djriley
This is really neat, I'll have to give it a try. I grew up on QuickBASIC, then Turbo Pascal and Turbo C later on. For my own personal hands on coding time solving mathematical challengers or working on hand coded personal projects to relax in our increasingly agent driven world I've taken to using the text mode Free Pascal ide that is bundled in with the fpc compiler, built on an open-source implementation of Borland's TurboVision DOS TUI libraries. I always wished it had a mode to emulate Turbo C as well.
The only bummer I'm seeing with fcc is not having a linker mean not being able to use external libraries. So you're really limited to what you can include in your own project, but if it truly is C89 compliant there are plenty of useful single header libraries you could use for various things.
I'll check it out!
- xenophonf
I'm not willing to whitelist whatever bullshit malware this thinly veiled advertisement wants to run on my computer before it will allow me to see the page. Can someone share a précis?
- rgovostes
The Adafruit post is just an LLM recap of the author's blog post, which is an LLM summary of the project, which was vibe coded with Claude. The signal:noise ratio is dropping off exponentially.
- hn_submit
Why is everyone calling LLM generated code "written from scratch" with almost no clue that they didn't write one line of code themselves? Yeah, it was written from scratch, but not by you!!
Projects like these are defiling the programmer's guild.