Welcome to the Getting Started section of the GCC Wiki

This section contains collected information geared towards folks who are new to GCC and may be feeling a bit lost in the barbaric jungles of GCC's source code. Although we are continuously trying to improve GCC's internal modularity and interfaces, the fact remains that GCC is about 20 years old, fairly large and we need to keep it working on the multitude of supported architectures and languages. So, getting to work with GCC can be a challenge.

Everyone is welcome to add links to tutorials, HOWTOs, cheat sheets, etc that may be floating around the net.

Basics

So, you are ready to contribute to GCC. We are constantly looking for new developers who are willing to donate their time to advance GCC.

Before you do, however, there is an important formality that you need to go through: Copyright assignment.

GCC is owned by the Free Software Foundation (FSF), as such, all contributors must assign their copyright to the FSF before any of their changes are accepted. The copyright assignment process is described in Contributing to GCC. (See also copyright papers and forms.)

Tutorials, HOWTOs

• Essential Abstractions in GCC (CGO 2011, Dr. Uday Khedker, Department of Computer Science & Eng IIT Bombay)

• GCC Compile Farm Lightning talk at GHM July 2010

• A blog about GCC development

• G++ internals (Eigen Summit, Feb 2010)

• Overview of GCC for users, Toulibre Dec 2010

• gcc internals podcast (Introduction)

• CMP SCI 610/410 - Compiler Techniques - Fall 2008 (multimedia lecture notes for a complete introductory compilers course with emphasis on gcc)

• Updated GCC Internals Tutorial (November 2007)

• GCC Optimization Course and Tutorial

• GCC Internals Tutorial at CGO 2007

• Workshop on GCC Internals (Advanced GCC Workshop 2007)

• Cheatsheet for loop optimizer (GCC summit 2007)

• GCC Summit Proceedings

• GCC Architecture Documents These documents by Abhijat Vichare are now a part of the GCC Resource Center (GRC).

• The ggx patch archive Blog entries by Anthony Green illustrating design of an ISA while simultaneously implementing support for the new architecture in binutils and GCC

• Dwarf2 Exception Handler HOWTO Also known as the "EH newbies HOWTO".

• gcc internals seminar notes (from 2005)

Internal documentation

• GCC internals

• CPP internals

• [BROKEN] GCC Middle End and Back End API reference (automatically generated with doxygen every week)

• Overview with Examples on the GENERIC Tree API

Dealing with the source code

• Formatting code for GCC

• Debugging GCC

• Testing GCC

• Compile time and memory utilization testing

• Writing a new pass

• Writing a new front-end

• Writing a new back end

Structure Of GCC

• Structure of GCC

• Language front ends

• Target independent code transformation frameworks

• Tree Optimizers

• RTL Optimizers

• Target dependent passes and code generation

• reload

Reporting and correcting bugs

When using Bugzilla, GCC maintainers (those having at least write after approval status to GCC trunk) should preferably use their username@gcc.gnu.org account to log in Bugzilla.