Development tools that work with programming languages benefit from their ability to understand the code with which they work at a level comparable to a compiler. C has become a popular and powerful language, but parsing it is a very challenging problem. This has discouraged the development of tools meant to work directly with the language.
There is one open-source C parser, the C front-end to GCC, which is currently able to deal with the language in its entirety. The purpose of the GCC-XML extension is to generate an XML description of a C program from GCC's internal representation. Since XML is easy to parse, other development tools will be able to work with C programs without the burden of a complicated C parser.
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