From your endorsement of "using the compiler's symbol tables" (paraphrasing) I took you to mean that you're proposing binding directly to GCC (or another tool) as a library, relying on it's internal data structures as this C API. Based on this comment, it sounds like you're now suggesting that this API should still be standardized and require translating from the compiler's internals into some standardized AST/symbol format anyways. I still think the latter is bonkers for several reasons (SIGABRT being one), but it's significantly less bonkers than what I had thought you were proposing initially.