(gccint.info.gz) GENERIC

 
 11 GENERIC
 **********
 
 The purpose of GENERIC is simply to provide a language-independent way
 of representing an entire function in trees.  To this end, it was
 necessary to add a few new tree codes to the back end, but most
 everything was already there.  If you can express it with the codes in
 `gcc/tree.def', it's GENERIC.
 
  Early on, there was a great deal of debate about how to think about
 statements in a tree IL.  In GENERIC, a statement is defined as any
 expression whose value, if any, is ignored.  A statement will always
 have `TREE_SIDE_EFFECTS' set (or it will be discarded), but a
 non-statement expression may also have side effects.  A `CALL_EXPR',
 for instance.
 
  It would be possible for some local optimizations to work on the
 GENERIC form of a function; indeed, the adapted tree inliner works fine
 on GENERIC, but the current compiler performs inlining after lowering
 to GIMPLE (a restricted form described in the next section). Indeed,
 currently the frontends perform this lowering before handing off to
 `tree_rest_of_compilation', but this seems inelegant.
 
  If necessary, a front end can use some language-dependent tree codes
 in its GENERIC representation, so long as it provides a hook for
 converting them to GIMPLE and doesn't expect them to work with any
 (hypothetical) optimizers that run before the conversion to GIMPLE. The
 intermediate representation used while parsing C and C++ looks very
 little like GENERIC, but the C and C++ gimplifier hooks are perfectly
 happy to take it as input and spit out GIMPLE.
(gccint.info.gz) GENERIC

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