## 15 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 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.44 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.45 These companies can provide services such as extending GCC to generate code for new CPUs or fixing bugs in the compiler.

#### Footnotes

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http://www.gnu.org/prep/service.html

##### (45)

http://www.network-theory.co.uk/gcc/intro/