The Visual Development of GCC Plug-ins

Code transformations allow the seamless addition of custom optimizations or specialized functionality to code at compile time. GCC plug-ins give developers this ability while allowing developers to leave the source code of GCC unmodified. Although this makes applying completed plug-ins easy, a thorough understanding of GCC internals, internal representations, and non-trivial source-to-internal mappings is still required.

We present a visual approach to plug-in development consisting of two components: a GCC plug-in and visualizer. The GCC plug-in extracts intermediate representation data to a database used by the visualizer. Specifically, we are able to visualize GIMPLE trees, control flow graphs, call graphs and the mapping from original source code to these internal representations. We also provide an interface to GDB for run-time plug-in debugging with visualization capabilities. This paper will demonstrate how these visualizations significantly ameliorate several problems facing transformation developers without relying on a simpler intermediate representation. Co-authors: Sean Callanan, Erez Zadok

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