Xc compiler
Shares rank 19 of 26 compilers by recommenders
People recommend Xc, a free Objective-C-like compiler that is simple to use and produces code about as fast as clang and gcc.
People recommend Xc, a free Objective-C-like compiler that is simple to use and produces code about as fast as clang and gcc.
7 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 7
- criticize it
- 0
- approval share
- 100%
Recommended in 5 of 13 months
- November 2025: not recommended
- December 2025: not recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: not recommended
- March 2026: not recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: not recommended
- June 2026: not recommended
- July 2026: not recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Owned for 6 months
Median of the 4 owners who said how long they have had it.
Each square is one year.
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 7 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, not met.
- Nobody criticizes itNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 5 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Simple, no build boilerplate
“the simplicity is the real win - there’s no GPU setup boilerplate”
Comment from 17 Oct 2026 in “Ask HN: How (if at all) are you leveraging LLMs?” “the real story here is the simplicity”
Comment from 13 Oct 2026 in “AI is a tool and using it well takes skill” Speed comparable to clang and gcc
“it produces code that is very comparable to clang in speed on both arm64 and x86_64”
Comment from 25 Sep 2026 in “Plan mode is dead” “It's pretty good - comparable to C++/gcc/clang in speed”
Comment from 14 Oct 2026 in “Ask HN: Why do people say "I built it" when we should say "Claude built it"?” Recommenders happy with it
“Yep, I'm happy with the optimisation”
Comment from 17 Sep 2026 in “Show HN: An ObjC-like compiler for Mac ARM, x86_64(Linux, Win), WASM, & others” “I'm pretty happy with it.”
Comment from 24 Aug 2026 in “Opinions About Compiler Building”
Other compilers people recommend
The four most recommended other compilers, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| GCC | 138 | 123 | 53% | 12 | 15 yrs9 owners | — |
| Clang | 74 | 50 | 60% | 12 | — | — |
| Free Pascal compiler | 38 | 7 | 84% | 11 | — | Approved |
| GraalVM Native Image | 31 | 9 | 78% | 11 | — | Approved |
| Xc compilerThis page | 7 | 0 | 100% | 5 | 6 mo4 owners | — |
What people said
16 of the 18 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“the simplicity is the real win - there’s no GPU setup boilerplate”
“It's pretty good - comparable to C++/gcc/clang in speed”
“the real story here is the simplicity”
“is (even if I say so myself) pretty cool”
“It’s surprising how useful this is, and it stops any drift between method signatures in the header/code”
“I believe in “real code”, not just unit tests and fixtures to coerce correctness”
“xc gets close enough for my needs”
“the advantage of owning the compiler is the ability to effect change in an afternoon”
“it produces code that is very comparable to clang in speed on both arm64 and x86_64”
“It needs no host-platform tools to compile code”
“They recently dropped the licensing requirement, so while it's not FOSS, it's freeware now, without limits.”
“Yep, I'm happy with the optimisation”
“It is indeed the goal to have a language better than (or at least fixing some of the pain points of) ObjC”
“I'm pretty happy with it.”
“Thanks, I hadn't seen either of those.”
“A couple more you may find interesting”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.