Author:

• Name: Fabrice Bellard
  Location: FR - French Republic (France)

To build:

    make

Bugs and (Mis)features:

The current status of this entry is:

STATUS: INABIAF - please DO NOT fix

For more detailed information see 2001/bellard in bugs.html.

To use:

    ./bellard file

Try:

    ./bellard bellard.otccex.c

Judges’ remarks:

<JUDGES_COMMENTS> :-)

Author’s remarks:

OTCC is an Obfuscated Tiny C Compiler for i386-linux. It generates FAST! i386 32 bit code (no bytecode) and it is powerful enough to compile itself. OTCC supports a strict subset of C. This subset is compilable by a standard ANSI C compiler. OTCC compiles, assembles, links and runs C code without the need of any other program.

You can use it by typing:

    ./bellard bellard.c [args]...

or by giving the C source to its standard input.

args are given to the main() function of bellard.c, argv[0] is bellard.c.

Examples:

• Sample compilation and execution:

    ./bellard bellard.otccex.c 10

• Self compilation:

    ./bellard bellard.c bellard.otccex.c 10

• Self compilation iterated…

    ./bellard bellard.c bellard.c bellard.otccex.c 10

An alternate syntax is to use it as a script interpreter: you can put #!/usr/local/bin/otcc at the beginning of your C source if you installed otcc at this place.

Supported C language subset

Read joint example bellard.otccex.c to have an introduction to OTCC dialect.

Expressions:

• binary operators, in decreasing precedence order: * / %, + -, >> <<, < <= > >=, == !=, &, ^, |, =, &&, ||.

• && and || have the same semantics as in C: left to right evaluation and early exit (short-circuited).

• Parenthesis are supported.

• Unary operators: &, * (pointer indirection), - (negation), +, !, ~, postfix ++ and --.

• Pointer indirection (*) only works with explicit cast to char *, int * or int (*)() (function pointer).

• ++, --, and unary & can only be used with variable lvalue (left value).

• = can only be used with variable or * (pointer indirection) lvalue.

• Function calls are supported with standard i386 calling convention. Function pointers are supported with explicit cast. Functions can be used before being declared.

• Types: only signed integer (int) variables and functions can be declared. Variables cannot be initialized in declarations. Only old K&R function declarations are parsed (implicit integer return value and no types on arguments).

• Any function or variable from the libc can be used because OTCC uses the libc dynamic linker to resolve undefined symbols.

• Instructions: blocks ({ }) are supported as in C. if and else can be used for tests. The while and for C loops are supported. break can be used to exit loops. return is used for the return value of a function.

• Identifiers are parsed the same way as C. Local variables are handled, but there is no local name space (not a problem if different names are used for local and global variables).

• Numbers can be entered in decimal, hexadecimal (0x or 0X prefix), or octal (0 prefix).

• #define is supported without function like arguments. No macro recursion is tolerated; other preprocessor directives are ignored.

• C Strings and C character constants are supported. Only \n, \", \' and \\ escapes are recognized.

• C Comments can be used (but no C++ comments).

• No error is displayed if an incorrect program is given.

• Memory: the code, data, and symbol sizes are limited to 100KB (it can be changed in the source code).

Obfuscation:

No special effort was needed because obfuscation is almost unavoidable for such a program :-) #defines must be used to compress the code, and integrated i386 code generator leads to non obvious code.

Portability:

OTCC only works on i386 linux because it generates i386 code. OTCC also relies on little endianness, unaligned memory accesses and ASCII representation of characters. It also supposes that no valid pointers are less than 512. If all those constraints are met, then OTCC could be theoretically used to “cross compile”, although no such support is currently integrated.

It was successfully compiled with gcc version 2.95.2. You get some warnings because old K&R prototypes are used, some casts are implicit and some functions are used before being defined. OTCC uses the dynamic linker to resolve symbols with dlsym(3), so -ldl must be used when you compile and link it.

Primary files

• bellard.c - entry source code
• Makefile - entry Makefile
• bellard.orig.c - original source code
• bellard.otccex.c - example otcc source
• otccelf.c - another example otcc source

Secondary files

• 2001_bellard.tar.bz2 - download entry tarball
• README.md - markdown source for this web page
• .entry.json - entry summary and manifest in JSON
• .gitignore - list of files that should not be committed under git
• .path - directory path from top level directory
• index.html - this web page

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