How to Get the Tiny C Compiler

2008-09-17

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How to acquire a C compiler

In this article, we explain what you need to do to acquire a C compiler and how to get your program ready for execution.

First, you need to acquire a C compiler. There are many C compilers available for free on the Internet. Our favourite is the Tiny C compiler available at

https://bellard.org/tcc/

Go to the site, scroll to Download and click on the link tcc-0.9.24-win32-bin.zip next to “Windows binary distribution”. Save the file to your Desktop or any other convenient place of your choosing. Extract the files to a folder called TinyC, say, on your C: drive. You should see the following in the folder:

The compiler is in the file tcc.exe. Tiny C is a blazingly fast compiler. It is also very small. The complete compiler with support files is about one megabyte – it can fit on a diskette!

How to store your program

In C Programming For Beginners – Part 3, we met the following program which calculates the area of a square:

#include <stdio.h> main() { int a, s;

printf(“Enter length of side: “); scanf("%d”, &s); //store length in s a = s * s; //calculate area; store in a printf(”\nArea of square is %d\n", a); }

Next, you must type the program to a file: you can name the file AreaOfSquare.c. It is recommended that you use .c for any file that contains a C program.

You must store your program as a text file. You can use Notepad or WordPad. You can use Word (or another word-processor) but be sure to save it as a text file.

For convenience, we assume that you have created a folder C:\CPrograms and will store your programs there.

Summary: we assume the Tiny C compiler has been installed in

C:\TinyC

and your program is stored in a file AreaOfSquare.c in the folder C:\CPrograms.

In the next article, we show how to compile and run the program.

References

Reference text: C Programming - A Beginner’s Course

Related programming references

This post is part of the series: C Programming for Beginners

A straightforward introduction to Programming in C for people with no previous programing experience.