GCC - An Architectural Overview, Current Status and Future Directions

The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) is one of the most popular compilers available and it is the de facto system compiler for Linux systems. Despite its popularity, the internal workings of GCC are relatively unknown outside of the immediate developer community.

This paper provides a high-level architectural overview of GCC, its internal modules and how it manages to support a wide variety of hardware architectures and languages. Special emphasis is placed on high-level descriptions of the different modules to provide a roadmap to GCC.

Finally, the paper also describes recent technological improvements that have been added to GCC and discusses some of the major features that the developer community is thinking for future versions of the compiler.