I know there are hundreds of C compilers and that I am just reinventing the wheel. But my main goal is just learning. I have already written another compiler before, but it was just for a toy language. For this reason, I would like to build a compiler for a "real-life" language, and C is an important but yet small language. I want to master the whole process of a fully working compiler for a "real-life" language, and afterwards continue to build on top of this knowledge, since I have been doing research on automatic parallelisation, and I am interested in optimising compilers in general.

Even if this project doesn't turn out to be useful for a lot of people, I hope at least to inspire a few people to tackle big problems.

I will always upvote something like this, but I am wondering: why write it in C++? I didn't really read the whole thing, but I skimmed a bit, and didn't see a lot of advantage taken of the higher-level facilities of C++. It seems like you've picked a route that gives you all the disadvantages of using C, while simultaneously destroying the possibility of it ever being self-hosting.

Still, a fun project, and you have my upvote. :)

Can you please add a free software license to your project, as it's currently proprietary? I'd recommend GPL, but go with whatever you want.

Contrary to popular opinion, copyright applies automatically to all of your works (unless you are an employee of the US Government). Due to the draconian nature of copyright laws, people have very few practical freedoms with your work unless you use a free software license (GPL, MIT, Apache, etc).

EDIT: Actually, looking through your GitHub profile it looks like most of your projects don't have free software licenses. Can you please rectify this, as it's clear you're doing cool work but it's not free software (or even "open source").

the computer science / computer programming problem I'd like to see solved is, keeping projects "fresh" and open/accessible enough that people like this could feel like they were learning in an unencumbered way, and at the same time contributing something useful to an existing project, while at the same time pushing the capabilities of what available open source projects can provide.

"Reinventing the wheel" projects absolutely litter public source nodes; believe me, I know why people do it; but my dream is the dream of software that most of us have given up on, code reuse, "reentrancy", shared libraries, etc.

Maybe something like a "wikipedia of source code".

I'm not discounting the benefit of doing a project to learn about it; what I'm saying is, too bad it's not code that will be useful for anything else without a lot more work; and too bad work is going into something that is not reuseful-able.

Where does one go for a fully representative sample of all kinds of valid C code to test a project like this? Or -- given a formal grammar, has someone produced a tool that generates representative code?

There are several other C compilers on Github. I list a few of them here.

https://github.com/melling/ComputerLanguages/blob/master/com...

They probably deserve their own section.