GCC MELT

GCC MELT is an open source plugin for the GCC (GNU Compiler Collection) project, providing a high-level domain specific language for extending or customizing g++, Gnat, GFortran, gobjc, Gccgo, and other utilities from the GNU Compiler Collection.

The software is tailored specifically for advanced GCC users, helping them develop, compile, improve, evaluate, maintain, or design important software coded in C++, Ada, C, Fortran, Go, Objective C, or any other programming language supported by the GCC compiler.

Includes powerful pattern matching functionality

The software also includes powerful pattern matching functionality, and lets developers manipulate raw GCC structures and dynamically typed values. Another interesting feature is the ability to browse the internal representations of the GCC compiler.

Why should you use GCC MELT to extend/customize GCC?

You should use the GCC MELT program to customize or extend GCC for specific warnings, metrics, specific coding rules validation, source code navigation, code refactoring, specific optimizations, as well as to add application- specific attributes or builtins to the compiler.

The project is engineered in such a way that it will lower the required effort to create plugins for the GCC compiler. As a matter of fact, it has been proved that it’s easier to code a GCC extension in MELT than to build a GCC plugin in the C++ or C programming languages.

Getting started with GCC MELT

To get started with the GCC MELT project, you should first download the latest release from either Softoware or its official website (see the homepage link at the end of the article). Save the archive somewhere on your computer, preferably your Home directory, and unpack it.

Open a Terminal app. Using the ‘cd’ command, you will navigate to the location where you’ve extracted the archive files (e.g. cd /home/softoware/melt-plugin-1.1.3-for-gcc-4.8-or-4.9). Then, run the ‘make’ command to compile the program.

What is new in this release:

• This release supports GCC 4.8 and 4.9.

What is new in version 1.0.1:

• This version fixes a bug to make building MELT for GCC 4.7 possible.

What is new in version 1.0:

• This is a major release (with perhaps some small incompatibilities with previous MELT plugin releases). A lot of new features are appearing. Much more ability to mix arbitrary C/C++ & MELT code in any way, and lots of new features both inside the MELT language and the MELT plugin, even for newbies. Some modes are now available and could be useful even without understanding much of the MELT domain specific language. MELT 1.0 is usable with GCC 4.7 and 4.8 but not usable with GCC 4.6 or earlier, because it requires a GCC compiler written in C++ and because it is generating C++ code.

Requirements:

• GCC