That makes sense. But if gcc doesn’t expose the AST (like clang does), why does it matter what its parser does? This “comparison” even says such: > GCC is buil

That makes sense. But if gcc doesn’t expose the AST (like clang does), why does it matter what its parser does? This “comparison” even says such: > GCC is built as a monolithic static compiler, which makes it extremely difficult to use as an API and integrate into other tools. Obviously, if gcc exposed the AST with an API, changing "x - x" into 0 would be bad for refactoring, but they don’t (at least when this was written a decade ago).