mc

A compiler small enough to read, written in itself.

mc compiles a schoolbook-C language — seven types, one opaque pointer, loop and if — for macOS, Linux and Windows, on arm64 and x86-64. A 2,848-line C23 seed is compiled by clang exactly once; after that mc compiles its own source, writes and signs (or directly writes) the executable itself, and reaches a fixed point where one generation is byte-identical to the next. Everything the core leaves out — while, for, +=, a second backend, a whole object model — you teach it from ordinary mc source.

• Website — https://minicompiler.dev
• The plan — docs/plan.md: the language, the teaching surface, the architecture, the budget and the milestones
• Projects, the bundled library, cross-compiling — docs/build.md: mc build, mc.toml, #include <name>, #embed, Linux and Windows targets
• How it compares — docs/comparison.md: compile time, binary size and run time against C, Go, Zig, Rust and C#
• CI and releases — docs/ci.md
• Examples — examples/
• 1.0.0 is cut — the public surface is recorded and frozen against removal (docs/reference/hooks.md § 8); see docs/plan.md § "What 1.0.0 promises, and what it does not"

Build it

make stage0     # clang compiles the C23 seed, once and never again
make mc1        # the seed compiles src/mc.mc into the real compiler
make check      # tests, the fixed point, the taught-surface demos, the examples

build/mc1 --exe src/mc.mc -o mc writes the signed, ld-free compiler in one step. Released binaries are ad-hoc signed and not notarized, so a download needs xattr -d com.apple.quarantine mc once — see docs/ci.md.