The Definitive Guide to GCC (eBook)

* Expanded and revised in light of the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) 4 release in April 2005, this book offers detailed coverage of GCC's somewhat daunting array of options and features and includes several chapters devoted to its support for languages like C, C++, Java, Objective-C, and Fortran.

* Though targeting beginner and intermediate developers, this book goes well beyond basic compiler usage, combining instruction of GCC's advanced features and utilities (authconf, libtool, and gprof) with key coding techniques, such as profiling and optimization to show how to build and manage enterprise-level applications.

* This is an enormous market. GCC is the defacto compiler collection for hundreds of thousands of open source projects worldwide, a wide variety of commercial development projects, and is the standard compiler for academic programs.

William von Hagen holds degrees in computer science, English writing, and art history. William has worked with UNIX systems since 1982, during which time he has been a system administrator, systems programmer, software developer, development manager, computing facilities operations manager, writer, documentation manager, and (now) content manager. William has written a number of books, including Linux Filesystems, Installing Red Hat Linux 7, and SGML For Dummies, and he contributed to writing Red Hat 7 Unleashed. He coauthored Mac OS X Power User's Guide with Brian Proffitt. William has written articles and software reviews for publications including Linux Magazine, Linux Format (UK), Maximum Linux, Mac Tech Magazine, Mac Home Magazine, and Mac Directory, and he has written extensive online material for CMP Media, Linux Planet, and Corel.

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This book, The Definitive Guide to GCC, is about how to build, install, customize, use, and troub- shoot GCC version 4.x. GCC has long been available for most major hardware and operating system platforms and is often the preferred family of compilers. As a general-purpose set of compilers, GCC produces high-quality, fast code. Due to its design, GCC is easy to port to different architectures, which contributes to its popularity. GCC, along with GNU Emacs, the Linux operating system, the Apache Web server, the Sendmail mail server, and the BIND DNS server, are showpieces of the free software world and proof that sometimes you can get a free lunch. Why a Book About GCC? I wrote this book, and you should read it, for a variety of reasons: it covers version 4.x; it is the only book that covers general GCC usage; and I would argue that it is better than GCC's own documen- tion. You will not find more complete coverage of GCC's features, quirks, and usage anywhere else in a single volume. There are no other up-to-date sources of information on GCC, excluding GCC's own documentation. GCC usually gets one or two chapters in programming books and only a few pa- graphs in other more general titles.