Section 7.3. The GNU Compiler Collection

7.3. The GNU Compiler Collection

If you are going to write a UNIX-like operating system, and one that is "Free" (certainly free of anyone else's intellectual property which might be restricted from the Free Software point of view), the first thing you need is a C compiler. Thus, a great deal of early effort by the FSF went into developing what was originally called the GNU C Compiler, or gcc.

Once they had a C compiler, some people began to write hundreds of utilities from ls to grep, while others began work on HURD, a microkernel for GNU. That work continues to this day. The bulk of the system commands you use on Linux were in fact developed by the FSF as part of the GNU project. This is why Stallman et al. want us all to refer to "GNU/Linux" rather than "Linux".^[5] An understandable, if unenforceable, position.

^[5] A viewpoint we understand and appreciate, but we do not bow to is that we must always say "GNU/Linux." We say it sometimes, but it gets tedious and annoying if used all the time. So we compromise. We tell you about GNU, but we'll usually say just "Linux" in the text.

It wasn't long before an effort began to integrate C++ into gcc. As time progressed, support for more and more languages and for more and more architectures^[6] was being added. At some point, it was decided to rename (reacronym?) gcc to mean "GNU Compiler Collection."

^[6] A lot of people do not realize this, but gcc is a cross-compiler. Precompiled binaries do not always support this, but if you build your compiler from source, you can use gcc to compile code for any supported platform. For example, you can compile a program for a PowerPC-based Macintosh on your Intel-based PC.

Not too surprisingly, as Java emerged and gained popularity, it became one of the languages supported by the GCC using a front end called gcj.^[7] That is what we'll be talking about here.

^[7] http://gcc.gnu.org/java/index.html