Is cc1 backend or frontend?

[Fergus Henderson]

On 07-May-2003, Diego Novillo <dnovillo@redhat.com> wrote:
> On Wed, 2003-05-07 at 04:18, Bernd Jendrissek wrote:
> 
> > 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?
>
> At the moment, the middle end does inlining on the tree representation,
> tree->RTL conversion and little else.

By the middle end, I mean all of the language-independent and
target-independent files.  There are a lot of RTL->RTL optimizations
which are written in a target-independent way, even though the details
of the RTL are target-dependent.

> That's changing with the tree-ssa
> branch.  See http://gcc.gnu.org/projects/tree-ssa/

What's changing with the tree-ssa branch is that the middle end is
becoming more cleanly separated from the back-end.

-- 
Fergus Henderson <fjh@cs.mu.oz.au>  |  "I have always known that the pursuit
The University of Melbourne         |  of excellence is a lethal habit"
WWW: <http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~fjh>  |     -- the last words of T. S. Garp.