Internal Architecture of the Compiler

This is meant to describe the C++ front-end for gcc in detail. Questions and comments to Mike Stump <mrs@cygnus.com>.

• Limitations of g++
• Routines
• Implementation Specifics
• Glossary
• Macros
• Typical Behavior
• Coding Conventions
• Templates
• Access Control
• Error Reporting
• Parser
• Copying Objects
• Exception Handling
• Free Store
• Mangling: Function name mangling for C++ and Java
• Concept Index

Limitations of g++

• Limitations on input source code: 240 nesting levels with the parser stacksize (YYSTACKSIZE) set to 500 (the default), and requires around 16.4k swap space per nesting level. The parser needs about 2.09 * number of nesting levels worth of stackspace.
• I suspect there are other uses of pushdecl_class_level that do not call set_identifier_type_value in tandem with the call to pushdecl_class_level. It would seem to be an omission.
• Access checking is unimplemented for nested types.
• volatile is not implemented in general.

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