4.6) GNU Compilers

The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) is an open source collection of compilers and is found on a wide variety of systems. It contains support for many languages including C, C++ and Fortran. It is widely used, highly portable and tends to produce good code but does not include any hardware specific optimisations. It provides numerous libraries as well as provide support for shared-memory programming via the OpenMP API as well as integrate with various MPI implementations for distributed memory parallel programming support.

To find information about a particular command or option use the man command, e.g. man gcc for information on the C compiler. Extensive documentation for the GNU compilers is available at http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/.