1@c Copyright (C) 2002 Free Software Foundation, Inc. 2@c This is part of the GCC manual. 3@c For copying conditions, see the file gcc.texi. 4 5@node Languages 6@chapter Language Front Ends in GCC 7 8The interface to front ends for languages in GCC, and in particular 9the @code{tree} structure (@pxref{Trees}), was initially designed for 10C, and many aspects of it are still somewhat biased towards C and 11C-like languages. It is, however, reasonably well suited to other 12procedural languages, and front ends for many such languages have been 13written for GCC@. 14 15Writing a compiler as a front end for GCC, rather than compiling 16directly to assembler or generating C code which is then compiled by 17GCC, has several advantages: 18 19@itemize @bullet 20@item GCC front ends benefit from the support for many different 21target machines already present in GCC@. 22@item GCC front ends benefit from all the optimizations in GCC@. Some 23of these, such as alias analysis, may work better when GCC is 24compiling directly from source code then when it is compiling from 25generated C code. 26@item Better debugging information is generated when compiling 27directly from source code than when going via intermediate generated C 28code. 29@end itemize 30 31Because of the advantages of writing a compiler as a GCC front end, 32GCC front ends have also been created for languages very different 33from those for which GCC was designed, such as the declarative 34logic/functional language Mercury. For these reasons, it may also be 35useful to implement compilers created for specialized purposes (for 36example, as part of a research project) as GCC front ends. 37