Internals of GCC


Today I will talk about the podcast “Internals of GCC”  by Software Engineering Radio with Morgan Deters as a guest. This podcast talks about compilers and how they internally work. It covers all the steps of a GNU Compiler Collection construction (in this case GNU), going from parsing different programming languages to machine optimizations and processor binary code generation.

At the beginning I found the recording a little tedious, however as it continued I learned a bit more about the subject. I learned a lot of things I never assumed with GCC, besides the fact I've used it for many projects in C. For instance, I thought it was compatible only for C programs, but I found out that it also works for C++, Java, and some other languages.

On the other hand, it was very interesting to learn about the compiler working process: it  goes through three different phases in which source code is transformed into target code for the computer to understand it and execute it correctly.

The GCC Compiler impressed me, principally because of the way it can be used for many languages. I also noticed how its structure is well defined, an aspect that facilitates its comprehension, even for people that aren’t experts in the field, like me. I wasn’t interested in translation from high-level to low-level languages at my first major’s semester because I thought it was a very complicated topic, but I think it will be a challenging task to do.

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