Original author(s) | Richard Stallman |
---|---|
Developer(s) | GNU Project |
Initial release | March 22, 1987 [1] |
Stable release | |
Repository | |
Written in | C, C++ [3] |
Operating system | Cross-platform |
Platform | GNU and many others |
Size | ~15 million LOC [4] |
Available in | English |
Type | Compiler |
License | GPLv3+ with GCC Runtime Library Exception [5] |
Website | gcc |
The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) is a collection of compilers from the GNU Project that support various programming languages, hardware architectures and operating systems. The Free Software Foundation (FSF) distributes GCC as free software under the GNU General Public License (GNU GPL). GCC is a key component of the GNU toolchain which is used for most projects related to GNU and the Linux kernel. With roughly 15 million lines of code in 2019, GCC is one of the largest free programs in existence. [4] It has played an important role in the growth of free software, as both a tool and an example.
When it was first released in 1987 by Richard Stallman, GCC 1.0 was named the GNU C Compiler since it only handled the C programming language. [1] It was extended to compile C++ in December of that year. Front ends were later developed for Objective-C, Objective-C++, Fortran, Ada, D, Go and Rust, [6] among others. [7] The OpenMP and OpenACC specifications are also supported in the C and C++ compilers. [8] [9]
GCC has been ported to more platforms and instruction set architectures than any other compiler, and is widely deployed as a tool in the development of both free and proprietary software. GCC is also available for many embedded systems, including ARM-based and Power ISA-based chips.
As well as being the official compiler of the GNU operating system, GCC has been adopted as the standard compiler by many other modern Unix-like computer operating systems, including most Linux distributions. Most BSD family operating systems also switched to GCC shortly after its release, although since then, FreeBSD and Apple macOS have moved to the Clang compiler, [10] largely due to licensing reasons. [11] [12] [13] GCC can also compile code for Windows, Android, iOS, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX and DOS. [14]
In late 1983, in an effort to bootstrap the GNU operating system, Richard Stallman asked Andrew S. Tanenbaum, the author of the Amsterdam Compiler Kit (also known as the Free University Compiler Kit) for permission to use that software for GNU. When Tanenbaum advised him that the compiler was not free, and that only the university was free, Stallman decided to work on a different compiler. [15] His initial plan was to rewrite an existing compiler from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory from Pastel to C with some help from Len Tower and others. [16] [17] Stallman wrote a new C front end for the Livermore compiler, but then realized that it required megabytes of stack space, an impossibility on a 68000 Unix system with only 64 KB, and concluded he would have to write a new compiler from scratch. [16] None of the Pastel compiler code ended up in GCC, though Stallman did use the C front end he had written. [16] [18]
GCC was first released March 22, 1987, available by FTP from MIT. [19] Stallman was listed as the author but cited others for their contributions, including Tower for "parts of the parser, RTL generator, RTL definitions, and of the Vax machine description", Jack Davidson and Christopher W. Fraser for the idea of using RTL as an intermediate language, and Paul Rubin for writing most of the preprocessor. [20] Described as the "first free software hit" by Peter H. Salus, the GNU compiler arrived just at the time when Sun Microsystems was unbundling its development tools from its operating system, selling them separately at a higher combined price than the previous bundle, which led many of Sun's users to buy or download GCC instead of the vendor's tools. [21] While Stallman considered GNU Emacs as his main project, by 1990 GCC supported thirteen computer architectures, was outperforming several vendor compilers, and was used commercially by several companies. [22]
As GCC was licensed under the GPL, programmers wanting to work in other directions—particularly those writing interfaces for languages other than C—were free to develop their own fork of the compiler, provided they meet the GPL's terms, including its requirements to distribute source code. Multiple forks proved inefficient and unwieldy, however, and the difficulty in getting work accepted by the official GCC project was greatly frustrating for many, as the project favored stability over new features. [23] The FSF kept such close control on what was added to the official version of GCC 2.x (developed since 1992) that GCC was used as one example of the "cathedral" development model in Eric S. Raymond's essay The Cathedral and the Bazaar .
In 1997, a group of developers formed the Experimental/Enhanced GNU Compiler System (EGCS) to merge several experimental forks into a single project. [23] [18] The basis of the merger was a development snapshot of GCC (taken around the 2.7.2 and later followed up to 2.8.1 release). Mergers included g77 (Fortran), PGCC (P5 Pentium-optimized GCC), [18] many C++ improvements, and many new architectures and operating system variants. [24]
While both projects followed each other's changes closely, EGCS development proved considerably more vigorous, so much so that the FSF officially halted development on their GCC 2.x compiler, blessed EGCS as the official version of GCC, and appointed the EGCS project as the GCC maintainers in April 1999. With the release of GCC 2.95 in July 1999 the two projects were once again united. [25] [18] GCC has since been maintained by a varied group of programmers from around the world under the direction of a steering committee. [26]
GCC 3 (2002) removed a front-end for CHILL due to a lack of maintenance. [27]
Before version 4.0 the Fortran front end was g77
, which only supported FORTRAN 77, but later was dropped in favor of the new GNU Fortran front end that supports Fortran 95 and large parts of Fortran 2003 and Fortran 2008 as well. [28] [29]
As of version 4.8, GCC is implemented in C++. [30]
Support for Cilk Plus existed from GCC 5 to GCC 7. [31] [32]
GCC has been ported to a wide variety of instruction set architectures, and is widely deployed as a tool in the development of both free and proprietary software. GCC is also available for many embedded systems, including Symbian (called gcce), [33] ARM-based, and Power ISA-based chips. [34] The compiler can target a wide variety of platforms, including video game consoles such as the PlayStation 2, [35] Cell SPE of PlayStation 3, [36] and Dreamcast. [37] It has been ported to more kinds of processors and operating systems than any other compiler. [38] [ self-published source? ][ better source needed ]
As of the 13.1 release, [update] GCC includes front ends for C (gcc
), C++ (g++
), Objective-C and Objective-C++, Fortran ( gfortran
), Ada (GNAT), Go (gccgo
), D (gdc
, since 9.1), [39] [40] and Modula-2 (gm2
, since 13.1) [41] [42] programming languages, [43] with the OpenMP and OpenACC parallel language extensions being supported since GCC 5.1. [9] [44] Versions prior to GCC 7 also supported Java ( gcj
), allowing compilation of Java to native machine code. [45]
Regarding language version support for C++ and C, since GCC 11.1 the default target is gnu++17, a superset of C++17, and gnu11, a superset of C11, with strict standard support also available. GCC also provides experimental support for C++20 and C++23. [46]
Third-party front ends exist for many languages, such as Pascal ( gpc
), Modula-3, and VHDL (GHDL
). [43] A few experimental branches exist to support additional languages, such as the GCC UPC compiler for Unified Parallel C [47] or Rust. [48] [49] [50] [ better source needed ]
GCC's external interface follows Unix conventions. Users invoke a language-specific driver program (gcc
for C, g++
for C++, etc.), which interprets command arguments, calls the actual compiler, runs the assembler on the output, and then optionally runs the linker to produce a complete executable binary.
Each of the language compilers is a separate program that reads source code and outputs machine code. All have a common internal structure. A per-language front end parses the source code in that language and produces an abstract syntax tree ("tree" for short).
These are, if necessary, converted to the middle end's input representation, called GENERIC form; the middle end then gradually transforms the program towards its final form. Compiler optimizations and static code analysis techniques (such as FORTIFY_SOURCE, [51] a compiler directive that attempts to discover some buffer overflows) are applied to the code. These work on multiple representations, mostly the architecture-independent GIMPLE representation and the architecture-dependent RTL representation. Finally, machine code is produced using architecture-specific pattern matching originally based on an algorithm of Jack Davidson and Chris Fraser.
GCC was written primarily in C except for parts of the Ada front end. The distribution includes the standard libraries for Ada and C++ whose code is mostly written in those languages. [52] [ needs update ] On some platforms, the distribution also includes a low-level runtime library, libgcc, written in a combination of machine-independent C and processor-specific machine code, designed primarily to handle arithmetic operations that the target processor cannot perform directly. [53]
GCC uses many additional tools in its build, many of which are installed by default by many Unix and Linux distributions (but which, normally, aren't present in Windows installations), including Perl,[ further explanation needed ] Flex, Bison, and other common tools. In addition, it currently requires three additional libraries to be present in order to build: GMP, MPC, and MPFR. [54]
In May 2010, the GCC steering committee decided to allow use of a C++ compiler to compile GCC. [55] The compiler was intended to be written mostly in C plus a subset of features from C++. In particular, this was decided so that GCC's developers could use the destructors and generics features of C++. [56]
In August 2012, the GCC steering committee announced that GCC now uses C++ as its implementation language. [57] This means that to build GCC from sources, a C++ compiler is required that understands ISO/IEC C++03 standard.
On May 18, 2020, GCC moved away from ISO/IEC C++03 standard to ISO/IEC C++11 standard (i.e. needed to compile, bootstrap, the compiler itself; by default it however compiles later versions of C++). [58]
Each front end uses a parser to produce the abstract syntax tree of a given source file. Due to the syntax tree abstraction, source files of any of the different supported languages can be processed by the same back end. GCC started out using LALR parsers generated with Bison, but gradually switched to hand-written recursive-descent parsers for C++ in 2004, [59] and for C and Objective-C in 2006. [60] As of 2021 all front ends use hand-written recursive-descent parsers.
Until GCC 4.0 the tree representation of the program was not fully independent of the processor being targeted. The meaning of a tree was somewhat different for different language front ends, and front ends could provide their own tree codes. This was simplified with the introduction of GENERIC and GIMPLE, two new forms of language-independent trees that were introduced with the advent of GCC 4.0. GENERIC is more complex, based on the GCC 3.x Java front end's intermediate representation. GIMPLE is a simplified GENERIC, in which various constructs are lowered to multiple GIMPLE instructions. The C, C++, and Java front ends produce GENERIC directly in the front end. Other front ends instead have different intermediate representations after parsing and convert these to GENERIC.
In either case, the so-called "gimplifier" then converts this more complex form into the simpler SSA-based GIMPLE form that is the common language for a large number of powerful language- and architecture-independent global (function scope) optimizations.
GENERIC is an intermediate representation language used as a "middle end" while compiling source code into executable binaries. A subset, called GIMPLE, is targeted by all the front ends of GCC.
The middle stage of GCC does all of the code analysis and optimization, working independently of both the compiled language and the target architecture, starting from the GENERIC [61] representation and expanding it to register transfer language (RTL). The GENERIC representation contains only the subset of the imperative programming constructs optimized by the middle end.
In transforming the source code to GIMPLE, [62] complex expressions are split into a three-address code using temporary variables. This representation was inspired by the SIMPLE representation proposed in the McCAT compiler [63] by Laurie J. Hendren [64] for simplifying the analysis and optimization of imperative programs.
Optimization can occur during any phase of compilation; however, the bulk of optimizations are performed after the syntax and semantic analysis of the front end and before the code generation of the back end; thus a common, though somewhat self-contradictory, name for this part of the compiler is the "middle end."
The exact set of GCC optimizations varies from release to release as it develops, but includes the standard algorithms, such as loop optimization, jump threading, common subexpression elimination, instruction scheduling, and so forth. The RTL optimizations are of less importance with the addition of global SSA-based optimizations on GIMPLE trees, [65] as RTL optimizations have a much more limited scope, and have less high-level information.
Some of these optimizations performed at this level include dead-code elimination, partial-redundancy elimination, global value numbering, sparse conditional constant propagation, and scalar replacement of aggregates. Array dependence based optimizations such as automatic vectorization and automatic parallelization are also performed. Profile-guided optimization is also possible. [66]
The GCC project includes an implementation of the C++ Standard Library called libstdc++, [67] licensed under the GPLv3 License with an exception to link non-GPL applications when sources are built with GCC. [68]
Some features of GCC include:
-fgnu-tm
. [8] [73] typeof
expressions. [77] The primary supported (and best tested) processor families are 64- and 32-bit ARM, 64- and 32-bit x86_64 and x86 and 64-bit PowerPC and SPARC. [78]
GCC target processor families as of version 11.1 include: [79]
Lesser-known target processors supported in the standard release have included:
Additional processors have been supported by GCC versions maintained separately from the FSF version:
The GCJ Java compiler can target either a native machine language architecture or the Java virtual machine's Java bytecode. [82] When retargeting GCC to a new platform, bootstrapping is often used. Motorola 68000, Zilog Z80, and other processors are also targeted in the GCC versions developed for various Texas Instruments, Hewlett Packard, Sharp, and Casio programmable graphing calculators. [83]
GCC is licensed under the GNU General Public License version 3. [84] The GCC runtime exception permits compilation of proprietary programs (in addition to free software) with GCC headers and runtime libraries. This does not impact the license terms of GCC source code. [85]
In computing, a compiler is a computer program that translates computer code written in one programming language into another language. The name "compiler" is primarily used for programs that translate source code from a high-level programming language to a low-level programming language to create an executable program.
GNU is an extensive collection of free software, which can be used as an operating system or can be used in parts with other operating systems. The use of the completed GNU tools led to the family of operating systems popularly known as Linux. Most of GNU is licensed under the GNU Project's own General Public License (GPL).
The GNU Debugger (GDB) is a portable debugger that runs on many Unix-like systems and works for many programming languages, including Ada, Assembly, C, C++, D, Fortran, Haskell, Go, Objective-C, OpenCL C, Modula-2, Pascal, Rust, and partially others.
The GNU Compiler for Java (GCJ) is a discontinued free compiler for the Java programming language. It was part of the GNU Compiler Collection.
The GNU Project is a free software, mass collaboration project announced by Richard Stallman on September 27, 1983. Its goal is to give computer users freedom and control in their use of their computers and computing devices by collaboratively developing and publishing software that gives everyone the rights to freely run the software, copy and distribute it, study it, and modify it. GNU software grants these rights in its license.
MinGW, formerly mingw32, is a free and open source software development environment to create Microsoft Windows applications.
LLVM is a set of compiler and toolchain technologies that can be used to develop a frontend for any programming language and a backend for any instruction set architecture. LLVM is designed around a language-independent intermediate representation (IR) that serves as a portable, high-level assembly language that can be optimized with a variety of transformations over multiple passes. The name LLVM originally stood for Low Level Virtual Machine, though the project has expanded and the name is no longer officially an initialism.
Open64 is a free, open-source, optimizing compiler for the Itanium and x86-64 microprocessor architectures. It derives from the SGI compilers for the MIPS R10000 processor, called MIPSPro. It was initially released in 2000 as GNU GPL software under the name Pro64. The following year, University of Delaware adopted the project and renamed the compiler to Open64. It now mostly serves as a research platform for compiler and computer architecture research groups. Open64 supports Fortran 77/95 and C/C++, as well as the shared memory programming model OpenMP. It can conduct high-quality interprocedural analysis, data-flow analysis, data dependence analysis, and array region analysis. Development has ceased, although other projects can use the project's source.
An intermediate representation (IR) is the data structure or code used internally by a compiler or virtual machine to represent source code. An IR is designed to be conducive to further processing, such as optimization and translation. A "good" IR must be accurate – capable of representing the source code without loss of information – and independent of any particular source or target language. An IR may take one of several forms: an in-memory data structure, or a special tuple- or stack-based code readable by the program. In the latter case it is also called an intermediate language.
Code::Blocks is a free, open-source, cross-platform IDE that supports multiple compilers including GCC, Clang and Visual C++. It is developed in C++ using wxWidgets as the GUI toolkit. Using a plugin architecture, its capabilities and features are defined by the provided plugins. Currently, Code::Blocks is oriented towards C, C++, and Fortran. It has a custom build system and optional Make support.
Richard Matthew Stallman, also known by his initials, rms, is an American free software movement activist and programmer. He campaigns for software to be distributed in such a manner that its users have the freedom to use, study, distribute, and modify that software. Software which ensures these freedoms is termed free software. Stallman launched the GNU Project, founded the Free Software Foundation (FSF) in October 1985, developed the GNU Compiler Collection and GNU Emacs, and wrote all versions of the GNU General Public License.
The Tiny C Compiler is an x86, X86-64 and ARM processor C compiler initially written by Fabrice Bellard. It is designed to work for slow computers with little disk space. Windows operating system support was added in version 0.9.23. TCC is distributed under the GNU Lesser General Public License.
GNU Fortran (GFortran) is an implementation of the Fortran programming language in the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), an open-source and free software project maintained in the open-source programmer community under the umbrella of the GNU Project. It is the successor to previous compiler versions in the suite, such as g77.
Interprocedural optimization (IPO) is a collection of compiler techniques used in computer programming to improve performance in programs containing many frequently used functions of small or medium length. IPO differs from other compiler optimizations by analyzing the entire program as opposed to a single function or block of code.
The Portable C Compiler is an early compiler for the C programming language written by Stephen C. Johnson of Bell Labs in the mid-1970s, based in part on ideas proposed by Alan Snyder in 1973, and "distributed as the C compiler by Bell Labs... with the blessing of Dennis Ritchie."
Leonard "Len" H. Tower Jr. is a free software activist and one of the founding board members of the Free Software Foundation, where he contributed to the initial releases of gcc and GNU diff. He left the Free Software Foundation in 1997.
Clang is a compiler front end for the programming languages C, C++, Objective-C, Objective-C++, and the software frameworks OpenMP, OpenCL, RenderScript, CUDA, SYCL, and HIP. It acts as a drop-in replacement for the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), supporting most of its compiling flags and unofficial language extensions. It includes a static analyzer, and several code analysis tools.
Oracle Developer Studio, formerly named Oracle Solaris Studio, Sun Studio, Sun WorkShop, Forte Developer, and SunPro Compilers, is the Oracle Corporation's flagship software development product for the Solaris and Linux operating systems. It includes optimizing C, C++, and Fortran compilers, libraries, and performance analysis and debugging tools, for Solaris on SPARC and x86 platforms, and Linux on x86/x64 platforms, including multi-core systems.
Mingw-w64 is a free and open-source suite of development tools that generate Portable Executable (PE) binaries for Microsoft Windows. It was forked in 2005–2010 from MinGW.
So he wrote to VUCK's author asking if GNU could use it. Evidently, VUCK's developer was uncooperative, responding that the university was free but that the compiler was not.
The GCC has been ported to (i.e., modified to run on) more than 60 platforms, which is more than for any other compiler.
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