Internals of GCC

Hi, in this post I will give my opinion about the podcast called "Internals of GCC" by Software Engineering Radio with Morgan Deters as a guest. The podcast makes a quick review around the process that involves the compilation and the focus of the interview turns around the notion of the base of the modern programming.

It talk about the gnu compiler collection (GCC) which is a collection of compiler framework, the characteristics of this framework is that it's portable and flexible because it's used in a lot of operating systems like Windows, MacOS and others. The gnu compiler is composed by a language specific front end, a middle end and for the last a back end, this make it very modular. 

Front End

Is like a black box and takes the given input in a plain text file or a source code in a form of standard tree (AST) , then makes it generic.

Middle End

Takes the generic tree from the front end and convert it into the register-transfer language (RTL).

Back End

Takes the RTL and generate the machine code, ready for the machine. 

This post help me to understand the importance of the expressions, matches and processing of each. I think it's a fabulous job that a single framework is compatible with a lot of systems and languages, you can translate any platform into a machine language.