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4 Language Front Ends in GCC ¶

The interface to front ends for languages in GCC, and in particularthetree structure (seeGENERIC), was initially designed forC, and many aspects of it are still somewhat biased towards C andC-like languages. It is, however, reasonably well suited to otherprocedural languages, and front ends for many such languages have beenwritten for GCC.

Writing a compiler as a front end for GCC, rather than compilingdirectly to assembler or generating C code which is then compiled byGCC, has several advantages:

GCC front ends benefit from the support for many differenttarget machines already present in GCC.
GCC front ends benefit from all the optimizations in GCC. Someof these, such as alias analysis, may work better when GCC iscompiling directly from source code than when it is compiling fromgenerated C code.
Better debugging information is generated when compilingdirectly from source code than when going via intermediate generated Ccode.

Because of the advantages of writing a compiler as a GCC front end,GCC front ends have also been created for languages very differentfrom those for which GCC was designed, such as the declarativelogic/functional language Mercury. For these reasons, it may also beuseful to implement compilers created for specialized purposes (forexample, as part of a research project) as GCC front ends.cc Copyright (C) 2002-2026 Free Software Foundation, Inc.