On SWE Radio 'The internals of GCC'

I'd want to admit, upfront, that I found this listen to be very fun, in the sense that I enjoy hearing about the specific details of a large project such as GCC. 

The specific detail of GCC that was discussed in this episode that fascinated me the most was this super cool trick that GCC has, where because of its emphasys on portability in theory you only need very minimal support for C on any given platform to be able to bootstrap yourself the entire GCC on that platform using GCC itself. They do this by use of modularity where there's a part of GCC that is deliberatley implemented in this basic, minimal version of C that, once you manage to build, you can then use to build the rest of GCC. So its kind of like a two-stage bootstrap I never heard of before.

The sad part regarding the episode is that a lot of it is spent talking about the three tier compiler architecture abstractly and its general reasoning and functionality which I had heard or read a lot about before (in llvm talks and compiler books) so those parts were just OK for me instead of amazing.

Another part that I enjoyed (a lot of credit to the interviewer here) is where they ask about three files in the gcc code that people can check out to get a glimpse of how things are. I think the answer that the interviewee gives is pretty good.