Cool! And I do think the world needs more C compilers. There is so much you could do with this language, but it needs to be disentangled from the C++ compiler behemoths. (yes, I now that there are other small C compilers)
There is the TCC. Adapting that would probably be a faster path to a full featured C compiler on esp32 than building up my xcc700. This is more of an educational sandbox project.
I would love to see how you handle variably-modified types, the way I retrofitted them onto chibicc never felt quite right, and I've never seen another non-gcc/clang compiler fully support noplate's VM type patterns.
Maybe I fill find the time to clean it up and make it public. But did not find VM-types difficult to implement, the type just depends on some run-time value, so at the point in time where the size expression is evaluated, one stores the result in a hidden variable which the type refers to.
What I found troublesome were not really the caching of array count, but when and where should the side effect be represented in AST, for example this one: https://godbolt.org/z/rcT1d8WWe the puts() call is a side effect for automatic variable but completely ignored for static variable.
Yes, it is a bit of mess. We started to make this more precise in the C standard when those expression have to be evaluated, but there are still issues. And when this is involved extensions there are more issues. I think in this example, such initializer would not be allowed in ISO C. I also fixed many bugs in GCC .
What we need is safety improvements in C, we already have enough security exploits in the standard library, strings and arrays, no need for more, without fixing what is broken since 1979 (lint birth year).
I have been contributing with C++ code since 1993, with bounded checked collection types in release code, and compiled managed languages since mid 2000's.
Even Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson themselves, went on with Alef, Limbo and Go.
I have been contributing by reducing my C, and C++ footprint on the planet, and security enforcement at various assignments.
