Introduction to the C Compiler

This chapter provides information about the C compiler, including operating environments, standards conformance, organization of the compiler, and C-related programming tools.

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1.1 Standards Conformance

The compiler conforms to the following standards:

• The ISO/IEC 9899:1990, Programming Languages - C standard. For information on implementation-specific behavior, see Appendix C.
• The FIPS 160 standard.

This release also supports some of the features specified in the following standard:

• The ISO/IEC 9899:1999, Programming Language - C standard. For more information on supported features, see Appendix D.

Because the compiler also supports traditional K&R C (Kernighan and Ritchie, or pre-ANSI C), it can ease your migration to ISO C.

The term C99 used in this book refers to the ISO/IEC 9899:1999 C programming language. There term C90 refers to the ISO/IEC 9899:1990 C programming language.

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1.2 Organization of the Compiler

The C compilation system consists of a compiler, an assembler, and a link editor. The cc command invokes each of these components automatically unless you use command-line options to specify otherwise.

Appendix A discusses all the options available with cc.

The following figure shows the organization of the C compilation system.

 FIGURE 1-1 Organization of the C Compilation System

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The following table summarizes the components of the compilation system.

TABLE 1-1 Components of the C Compilation System

Component	Description	Notes on Use
cpp	Preprocessor	-Xs only
acomp	Compiler (preprocessor built in for non-Xs modes)
ssbd	Static synchronization bug detection	(SPARC)
iropt	Code optimizer	(SPARC) -O, -xO2, -xO3, -xO4, -xO5, -fast
fbe	Assembler
cg	Code generator, inliner, assembler	(SPARC)
ipo	Interprocedural Optimizer	(SPARC)
postopt	Postoptimizer	(SPARC)
ir2hf	Intermediate code translator	(INTEL)
ube	Code generator	(INTEL)
ube_ipa	Interprocedure analyzer	(INTEL)
ld	Linker
ild	Incremental linker	(SPARC) -g, -xildon
mcs	Manipulate comment section	-mr

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1.3 C-Related Programming Tools

There are a number of tools available to aid in developing, maintaining, and improving your C programs. The two most closely tied to C, cscope and lint, are described in this book. In addition, a man page exists for each of these tools.

Other tools for source browsing, debugging and performance analysis are available. See Accessing Forte Developer Documentation for more information.