[Coco] Re: gcc-coco revisited

[David]

On Sat, Nov 01, 2003 at 10:17:50AM -0500, John E. Malmberg wrote:
> Theodore A. Evans wrote:
> >On 10/31/03, John E. Malmberg wrote:
> >
> >>Also for the education of those that are used to traditional compilers,
> >>GCC is a bit different.
> >>
> >>GCC is a shell that calls/chains the other programs in sequence to produce
> >>the expected results. The preprocessor program is typically separate from
> >>the complier, followed by an optimizer program, followed by the assember
> >>program, and finally a linker program.
> >
> >That *is* the way that traditional C compilers work.  Microware C
> >works that way as does pretty much every C compiler I have ever used.
> 
> On almost every platform that I have programed C regularly on, there is 
> one complier image that takes the source module and produces an object 
> module.  I can usually request the various intermediate outputs.
> 
> I have a few commercial C complilers for Microsoft Windows, and they 
> work that way.
> 
> Of course smaller microprocessor systems tend to chain programs because 
> of memory constraints.

Yes, that is it, I think.  And, as Theodore stated, the Microware C
compiler works this way.. cc creates a series of commands that calls
the individual phases/programs in sequence.  Seems like someone
modified it, or else suggested a way to manually create a compile
script, that would pipe the output of one phase into the input of
another, if you have enough memory.  I tried it on a few things
and it did, indeed, speed things up.