Is cc1 backend or frontend?

Wed May 7 08:22:00 GMT 2003

On Wed, May 07, 2003 at 04:54:35PM +1000, Fergus Henderson wrote:
> On 06-May-2003, Bernd Jendrissek <berndj@prism.co.za> wrote:
> > I've seen mention of libbackend.a; maybe that's the backend proper, but I
> > don't know.
> 
> Actually it's best to think of it as three parts: a language-specific
> front-end, a language-independent and target-independent "middle-end",
> and a target-specific back-end.  libbackend.a contains the middle-end
> and the back-end.

Ah, so libbackend.a is real (I don't watch make bootstrap *that* closely
to know:)  But... what exactly *does* the middle-end do?  I assume it does
some optimizations, maybe CSE, hoisting stuff out of loops, etc.?  But if
none of the optimizations are enabled, what's left - TREE->RTL conversion?