# Xc compiler

7 Hacker News commenters recommended Xc compiler and 0 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 5 of 13 months; owners who said how long report a median of 0.5 years (4 owners).

**Verdict:** People recommend Xc, a free Objective-C-like compiler that is simple to use and produces code about as fast as clang and gcc.

## Why people recommend it

- Simple, no build boilerplate (2 comments): "the simplicity is the real win - there’s no GPU setup boilerplate" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50128842)) "the real story here is the simplicity" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50068489))
- Speed comparable to clang and gcc (2 comments): "it produces code that is very comparable to clang in speed on both arm64 and x86_64" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49841767)) "It's pretty good - comparable to C++/gcc/clang in speed" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50085451))
- Recommenders happy with it (2 comments): "Yep, I'm happy with the optimisation" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49742200)) "I'm pretty happy with it." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49420463))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [GCC](https://hackerapproved.com/p/gcc.md): 138 recommend
- [Clang](https://hackerapproved.com/p/clang.md): 74 recommend
- [Free Pascal compiler](https://hackerapproved.com/p/free-pascal.md): 38 recommend
- [GraalVM Native Image](https://hackerapproved.com/p/graalvm-native-image.md): 31 recommend
- [.NET Native AOT](https://hackerapproved.com/p/net-native-aot.md): 26 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Xc compiler", https://hackerapproved.com/p/xc/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).