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.