GENERIC: Meaning (information, definition, explanation, facts)

This article is about computer software. For related uses of the word, see Generic.

In the GNU Compiler Collection, GENERIC is an intermediate representation common to all the front-ends of GCC. The middle-end of GCC, starting with the GENERIC representation and ending after the expansion to RTL, contains all the optimizers and analyzers working independently of the compiled language and independently of the target architecture.

The GENERIC representation contains only the subset of the imperative programming constructs optimized by the middle-end.