Do any C-targeting compilers allow inline C?

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Some C compilers emit assembly language and allow snippets of assembly to be placed inline in the source code to be copied verbatim to the output, e.g. https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Using-Assembly-Language-with-C.html

Some compilers for higher-level languages emit C, ranging from Nim which was to some extent designed for that, to Scheme which very definitely was not, and takes heroic effort to compile to efficient code that way.

Do any such compilers, similarly allow snippets of C to be placed inline in the source code, to be copied verbatim to the output?

programming-languages syntax c
1 Answers

I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "be copied verbatim to the output," but all C compilers (msvc, gcc, clang, etc...) have preprocessor directives that essentially allow snippets of code to be added to the source files for compilation. For example, the #include directive will pull in the contents the specified file to be included in compilation. An "effect" of this is that you can do weird things such as:

printf("My code: \n%s\n",
#include "/tmp/somefile.c"
);

Alternatively, creating macros with the #define directive allows you to supplant snippets of code by calling a macro name. This all happens at the preprocessor stage before turning into the compile "output."

Other languages, like c# with roslyn, allows runtime compilation of code. Of course, you can also implement the same within c by calling your compiler as via something like system() and then loading the resulting library with dlopen.

Edit: Now that I come back and think about this question, I should also note that python is one of those C-targeting "compilers" (I guess technically a interpreter on top of the python runtime). Python let's you use native C compiled code with some either some py API code to export functions or directly with some dlopen-like helpers. Take a look at the inlinec module that does what I described above (call the compiler then load the compiled code). I suppose you should have the ability to do similar functionality with any language that can call c compiled code (c#, java, etc...).

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