GNU Compiler Collection

Supported languages

As of the 16.1 release, GCC includes front ends for C (gcc), C++ (g++), Objective-C, Objective-C++, Fortran (gfortran), Ada (GNAT), Go (gccgo), D (gdc, since 9.1), Modula-2 (gm2, since 13.1), Rust (gccrs, since 15.1), COBOL (gcobol, since 15.1), and ALGOL 68 (ga68, since 16.1) programming languages, with the OpenMP and OpenACC parallel language extensions being supported since GCC 5.1. Versions prior to GCC 7 also supported Java (gcj), allowing compilation of Java to native machine code.

Third-party front ends exist for many languages, such as Pascal (gpc), Mercury, Modula-3, VHDL (GHDL) and PL/I. A few experimental branches exist to support additional languages, such as the GCC UPC compiler for Unified Parallel C.

The default target for C++ since GCC 15.1 is gnu++20, a superset of C++20, and the default target for C since GCC 15 is gnu23, a superset of C23, with strict standard support also available. GCC also provides experimental support for C2Y, C++23, and C++26. GCC 16.1 was released on 30 April 2026.

Design

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, 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. 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.

GCC uses many additional tools in its build, many of which are installed by default by many Unix and Linux distributions (but which are normally not present in Windows installations), including Perl, 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.

In May 2010, the GCC steering committee decided to allow use of a C++ compiler to compile GCC. 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++.

In August 2012, the GCC steering committee announced that GCC was to use C++ as its implementation language. 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 the 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++).

Front ends

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, and for C and Objective-C in 2006. 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 language- and architecture-independent global (function scope) optimizations.

GENERIC and GIMPLE

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 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, 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 by Laurie J. Hendren for simplifying the analysis and optimization of imperative programs.

Optimization

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, as RTL optimizations have a much more limited scope, and have less high-level information.

Some of the 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.

C++ Standard Library (libstdc++)

The GCC project includes an implementation of the C++ Standard Library called libstdc++, licensed under the GPLv3 License with an exception to link non-GPL-compatible applications when sources are built with GCC. Since GCC Version 3, the C++ ABI is based on the ABI published by Intel for the Itanium C++ ABI.

Other features

Some features of GCC include:

Link-time optimization

Link-time optimization optimizes across object file boundaries to directly improve the linked binary. Link-time optimization relies on an intermediate file containing the serialization of some Gimple representation included in the object file. The file is generated alongside the object file during source compilation. Each source compilation generates a separate object file and link-time helper file. When the object files are linked, the compiler is executed again and uses the helper files to optimize code across the separately compiled object files.

Plugins

Plugins extend the GCC compiler directly. Plugins allow a stock compiler to be tailored to specific needs by external code loaded as plugins. For example, plugins can add, replace, or even remove middle-end passes operating on Gimple representations. Several GCC plugins have already been published, notably:

• The Python plugin, which links against libpython, and allows one to invoke arbitrary Python scripts from inside the compiler. The aim is to allow GCC plugins to be written in Python.
• The MELT plugin provides a high-level Lisp-like language to extend GCC.

The support of plugins was once a contentious issue in 2007.

C++ transactional memory

The C++ language has an active proposal for transactional memory. It can be enabled in GCC 6 and newer when compiling with -fgnu-tm.

Unicode identifiers

Although the C++ language requires support for non-ASCII Unicode characters in identifiers, the feature has only been supported since GCC 10. As with the existing handling of string literals, the source file is assumed to be encoded in UTF-8. The feature is optional in C, but has been made available too since this change.

C extensions

GNU C extends the C programming language with several non-standard-features, including nested functions.

Architectures

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.

GCC target processor families as of version 11.1 include:

• AArch64
• Alpha
• ARM
• AVR
• Blackfin
• eBPF
• Epiphany (GCC 4.8)
• H8/300
• HC12
• IA-32 (32-bit x86)
• IA-64 (Intel Itanium)
• MIPS
• Motorola 68000 series
• MSP430
• Nvidia GPU
• Nvidia PTX
• PA-RISC
• PDP-11
• PowerPC
• R8C / M16C / M32C
• RISC-V
• SPARC
• SuperH
• System/390 / z/Architecture
• VAX
• x86-64

Lesser-known target processors supported in the standard release have included:

• 68HC11
• A29K
• C6x
• CR16
• D30V
• DSP16xx
• ETRAX CRIS
• FR-30
• FR-V
• IBM ROMP
• Intel i960
• IP2000
• M32R
• MCORE
• MIL-STD-1750A
• MMIX
• MN10200
• MN10300
• Motorola 88000
• NS32K
• RL78
• Stormy16
• V850
• Xtensa

Additional processors have been supported by GCC versions maintained separately from the FSF version:

• Cortus APS3
• ARC
• AVR32
• C166 and C167
• D10V
• EISC
• eSi-RISC
• Hexagon
• LatticeMico32
• LatticeMico8
• MeP
• MicroBlaze
• Motorola 6809
• MSP430
• NEC SX architecture
• Nios II and Nios
• OpenRISC
• PDP-10
• PIC24/dsPIC
• PIC32
• Propeller
• Saturn (HP48XGCC)
• System/370
• TIGCC (m68k variant)
• TMS9900
• TriCore
• Z8000
• ZPU

The GCJ Java compiler can target either a native machine language architecture or the Java virtual machine's Java bytecode. 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.

License

GCC is licensed under the GNU General Public License version 3. 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.

However this exception is limited. For example, when non-GPL-compatible software is used together with GCC within the Compile Process, following the GPLv3 for all of the propagated object code GCC generates, becomes mandatory as it is derived from the GPL-licensed libraries.