14 Getting help

If you encounter a problem not covered by this introduction, there are several reference manuals which describe GCC and language-related topics in more detail (see section Further reading). These manuals contain answers to common questions, and careful study of them will usually yield a solution.

Alternatively, there are many companies and consultants who offer commercial support for programming matters related to GCC on an hourly or ongoing basis. For businesses this can be a cost-effective way to obtain high-quality support.

A directory of free software support companies and their current rates can be found on the GNU Project website.⁽³⁸⁾ With free software, commercial support is available in a free market--service companies compete in quality and price, and users are not tied to any particular one. In contrast, support for proprietary software is usually only available from the original vendor.

A higher-level of commercial support for GCC is available from companies involved in the development of the GNU compiler toolchain itself. A listing of these companies can be found in the "Development Companies" section of the publisher's webpage for this book.⁽³⁹⁾ These companies can provide services such as extending GCC to generate code for new CPUs or fixing bugs in the compiler.