> And one cannot just throw away a backend and say that it's not part of the compiler.

OK. Let me rephrase: TCC doesn't have 35k lines of code, but with five minutes' work it could be turned into a compiler with 35k lines of code capable of bootstrapping GCC on Linux. That should be enough to compare it to the ones you list.

That's an interesting way to put it. :-D I believe we could do that to a lot of other compilers, say, lcc (30k) with its multiple backends and get something like 10-20k.

Anyways, what I was trying to say is that "tiny" in "tinycc" has lost its meaning already.

cproc is not 7K self-contained either; from the GitHub page: "cproc is a C11 compiler using QBE as a backend".

that's correct. But even if you add qbe you only get 12k more, or about 20k, not 70k.