The purpose of this chapter was to introduce gcc at a non-complex,
yet useful, level. The examples were not too demanding, and covered a broad
spectrum of commonly used options.
The examples throughout this chapter revolved around hand-typing commands
in a terminal. For very small projects of only a few files, this is fine;
larger projects require much more attention. The next chapter, GNU Make,
takes a look into using make files for projects, to enable you to easily
manage how projects are built.
gcc is one of the fundamental tools for building software; but for advanced
projects, advanced tools are needed. Although GNU make is useful for source code
management, Autoconf and Automake enable us to extend make files auch that
configuration and management of make files becomes much easier. In addition, Libtool
makes library creation and management much simpler too.