GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) 4.2 Internals

6.2 Top Level Source Directory

The top level source directory in a GCC distribution contains several files and directories that are shared with other software distributions such as that of GNU Binutils. It also contains several subdirectories that contain parts of GCC and its runtime libraries:

boehm-gc

The Boehm conservative garbage collector, used as part of the Java runtime library.

contrib

Contributed scripts that may be found useful in conjunction with GCC. One of these, contrib/texi2pod.pl, is used to generate man pages from Texinfo manuals as part of the GCC build process.

fastjar

An implementation of the jar command, used with the Java front end.

gcc

The main sources of GCC itself (except for runtime libraries), including optimizers, support for different target architectures, language front ends, and testsuites. See The gcc Subdirectory, for details.

include

Headers for the libiberty library.

libada

The Ada runtime library.

libcpp

The C preprocessor library.

libgfortran

The Fortran runtime library.

libffi

The libffi library, used as part of the Java runtime library.

libiberty

The libiberty library, used for portability and for some generally useful data structures and algorithms. See Introduction, for more information about this library.

libjava

The Java runtime library.

libmudflap

The libmudflap library, used for instrumenting pointer and array dereferencing operations.

libobjc

The Objective-C and Objective-C++ runtime library.

libstdc++-v3

The C++ runtime library.

maintainer-scripts

Scripts used by the gccadmin account on gcc.gnu.org.

zlib

The zlib compression library, used by the Java front end and as part of the Java runtime library.

The build system in the top level directory, including how recursion into subdirectories works and how building runtime libraries for multilibs is handled, is documented in a separate manual, included with GNU Binutils. See GNU configure and build system, for details.