GCC for New Contributors

This is an unofficial guide to GCC’s internals, aimed at new developers, and at plugin authors.

Source: https://github.com/davidmalcolm/gcc-newbies-guide

I’m a relative newcomer to GCC, so I thought it was worth documenting some of the hurdles I ran into when I started working on GCC, to try to make it easier for others to start hacking on GCC. Hence this guide.

Other sources of information:

• The official “Contributing to GCC” guide on the GCC website: https://gcc.gnu.org/contribute.html

• The official GCC “internals” guide is: https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gccint/

• Another excellent resource is the material available at the website of the GCC Resource Center at IIT Bombay: https://www.cse.iitb.ac.in/grc/

• There is also much information on the GCC wiki: https://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/HomePage though sadly much of it is out-of-date - GCC is (at the time of writing) a 30-year-old project.

Contents:

• Diving into GCC internals
• “Gotchas” and FAQs
• Getting Started
• Making a patch
• Debugging GCC
• Working with the testsuite
• How to improve the location of a gcc diagnostic
• Memory Management in GCC
• TODO