GCC and fdump-translation-unit

1 msg	Getting process's memory usage
1 msg	libgcc.mvars: No such file or directory
1 msg	Please Verify Your Email Address: REPLY to this...
2 msg	GCC port for PICs
6 msg	Unresolved symbol problem
6 msg	Customizing uncaught exception messages
1 msg	Listings for specialties such as: family practi...
1 msg	MESSAGE NOT DELIVERED: photo Full for cole
2 msg	atomic builtin routines
4 msg	Is there a way to build a program without stdli...
3 msg	Optimizer problem with repeated loops over memory
3 msg	no include files in the resulting install of GC...
2 msg	far (48bit) pointer addressing
2 msg	Using libgcc library in commercial product
5 msg	c++: Function style initializer
3 msg	Warning
1 msg	Help needed building gcc-2.95.3 on HPUX 11.31 IA
13 msg	Problem with FD_SET on mips

GCC and fdump-translation-unit
\ pingu219 (10 May 2008)
. \ Andrew Haley (10 May 2008)

7 msg	error: missing terminating ' character while mo...

Subject:	GCC and fdump-translation-unit
Group:	Gcc-help
From:	pingu219
Date:	10 May 2008

I'm a student whose currently trying to build a refactoring tool for C
and I thought it might be best to dump the intermediate representation
of the source code straight from the gcc compiler frontend. However
the tokens seem to be missing stuff like full postion information and
from what I've heard function bodies aren't dumped either except with
g++ and C++ though this might be outdated info.

The tree seems to have been optimised and had alot of folding by the
time gcc dumps it so I was wondering if there was a way of getting a
complete, pre-optimised tree from gcc maybe via a commandline argument
or if there's a suitable API. I also keep hearing about how gcc's
frontend is intermingled with the backend though I'm not sure what
exactly is meant by that. It would be great to hear your thoughts on
the utility of gcc for source code analysis by an external tool.