Re: building gcc

[Bob Rossi <bob_rossi at cox dot net>]

On Sat, Oct 14, 2006 at 02:16:01PM +1000, Brendon Costa wrote:
> Bob Rossi wrote:
> > Hi Ian,
> >
> > Basically, I want to use GCC with C,C++. I want to walk a tree that GCC
> > creates for the translation units. I would like to know if for these two
> > languages if I should use a language dependent tree, the generic tree or
> > the gimple tree. In general, I would like to use the tree that most
> closely
> > resembles the source language, and that is documented best.
> >
> > For starters, can you recommend which tree structure I should use in
> > GCC? If so, would it be to much to ask to point me to the object in the
> > source code that represents the tree after the tree has been populated?
> >
> > If I should be using gimple, I found this paper.
> > ftp://gcc.gnu.org/pub/gcc/summit/2003/GENERIC%20and%20GIMPLE.pdf
> > Is there any other good documentation on this?
> 
> I cant help much as i have only been fumbling around in the GCC source
> for a short time now and still have no idea about a lot of stuff.
> However I did want to also look at the full tree for the C++ front end.
> I did this from the parser.c: cp_parser_translation_unit() function just
> after the call to: finish_translation_unit() and I was looking at the
> tree defined globally elsewhere in the variable: global_namespace

Thanks Brendon, that was really helpful. I'm very new at this, and may 
have some seemingly rather odd questions. I see that global_namespace is
of type 'union tree_node'. Is this the C++ language dependent AST?

I found the documentation doc/c-tree.info. Is this the documentation
representing the global_namespace tree? Is there any better
documentation that you know of?

Also, I noticed that converting it to html failed. Maybe this is a 
documentation error?

Thanks again,
Bob Rossi

$ makeinfo --html ../../../gcc/gcc/doc/c-tree.texi
../../../gcc/gcc/doc/c-tree.texi:10: `Trees' has no Up field (perhaps
incorrect sectioning?).
makeinfo: Removing output file
`/home/bob/rcs/svn/gcc/gcc/builddir/gcc/doc/c-tree/index.html' due to
errors; use --force to preserve.

$ makeinfo --version
makeinfo (GNU texinfo) 4.8