4 The GCC low-level runtime library
GCC provides a low-level runtime library, libgcc.a or libgcc_s.so.1 on some platforms. GCC generates calls to routines in this library automatically, whenever it needs to perform some operation that is too complicated to emit inline code for.
Most of the routines in libgcc handle arithmetic operations
that the target processor cannot perform directly. This includes
integer multiply and divide on some machines, and all floating-point
operations on other machines. libgcc also includes routines
for exception handling, and a handful of miscellaneous operations.
Some of these routines can be defined in mostly machine-independent C. Others must be hand-written in assembly language for each processor that needs them.
GCC will also generate calls to C library routines, such as
memcpy and memset, in some cases. The set of routines
that GCC may possibly use is documented in Other Builtins.
These routines take arguments and return values of a specific machine
mode, not a specific C type. See Machine Modes, for an explanation
of this concept. For illustrative purposes, in this chapter the
floating point type float is assumed to correspond to SFmode;
double to DFmode; and long double to both
TFmode and XFmode. Similarly, the integer types int
and unsigned int correspond to SImode; long and
unsigned long to DImode; and long long and
unsigned long long to TImode.