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information and from what I've heard function bodies aren't dumped either except with g++ and C++ though this might be outdated info.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.
