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Does GCC/G++ have an option available to output analysis?
It would be useful to be able to compare differences between the previous code with the new one (size, sizes of classes/structures). Those can then be diff’d with the previous output for comparison, which could be useful for many purposes.
If no such output analysis is available, what is the best way to obtain such information?
GCCXML is a (GCC variant) that dumps symbol and type declaration data in an XML format. That may or may not have the “properties” you care about in them.
If you want specific information, you may be able to bend GCC to produce it. The learning curve for this is likely long and hard, because GCC wants to be a compiler, not a your-favorite-property-dumper, and it is a big, complex tool. You probably have some kind of chance with “struct size” as the compiler must compute that somewhere and it seems reasonable that it would be stored with information about the struct declaration. I’d expect that some of the command line switches do output some information and you might consider trying to emulate those. If you want really odd properties such as “register pressure inside a loop” you’ll have to reach deeply inside a compiler.
If you want general properties derivable from the source code you will want to use a language-processing framework that has a strong C front end integrated into it. Clang is one. It likely has a learning curve similar to that for GCC, but is said to be better designed for tasks like yours. I have no specific experience with this.
Our DMS Software Reengineering Toolkit is explicitly designed to support such tasks. It has a full C Front End, with APIs for building full parse trees, symbol tables relating identifiers to their point of declaration, actual type, and full control and data flow analysis. DMS also has a and a full C++ Front End, with similar properties, but it does not yet provide flow analysis information. DMS lets you write arbitrary code on top of this compute whatever (arbitrary property) you like.