GCC extensions

This is a list of (experimental) extensions to GCC which, for one reason or the other, did not (yet) make it into the official source tree. Please direct feedback and bug reports to their respective maintainers, not our mailing lists.

CTraps plugin for GCC

CTraps, short for Communication Traps, adds a compiler pass as a plugin that instruments instructions that access memory locations that might be shared between threads. It supports dynamic program analysis, debugging, and performance tuning in concurrent code.

Lua plugin for GCC

gcc‑lua extends GCC with the ability to run Lua scripts. The plugin provides an interface to register callback functions for plugin events, and inspect the abstract syntax tree of a translation unit.

StarPU

StarPU is a GCC extension and run-time support library for hybrid CPU/GPU task programming. Its GCC plug-in allows programmers to annotate C code to describe tasks and their implementations. Each task may have one or more implementations, such as CPU implementations or implementations written in OpenCL.

StarPU's support library schedules tasks over the available CPU cores and GPUs, and is also responsible for scheduling any data transfers between main memory and GPUs.

PDP-10 port

This is an experimental port of GCC to the DEC PDP-10 architecture.

Bounds checking patches for GCC releases

These patches add a -fbounds-checking flag that adds bounds checking tests to pointer and array accesses. Richard Jones developed the patches against gcc 2.7 in 1995. Herman ten Brugge is the current maintainer and has updated the patches for GCC 2.95.2 and later. William Bader has patches as well.

You may freely mix object modules compiled with and without bounds checking. The bounds checker also includes replacements for mem* and str* routines and can detect invalid calls against checked memory objects, even from modules compiled without bounds checking.