Am I the only one...

who thinks GCC sucks? Not the compiling engine, but the interface to it. It's made of confusing, illogical, error prone options with stupid default values, and the idea of calling everyone and their mother itself (and mix everyone's options together) is as bad as penis cancer. For example, -s is passed directly to the linker, yet -rpath isn't; -Wall and most of -Wstuff controls warnings, yet -Wl is some kind of hack to pass comma-separated arguments to the linker, especially the ones not supported by gcc; etc. Whoever did this has a disturbed mind. And I think I know who did this.

Anyways, is there a sane interface which provides completely separate, non-automagical preprocessor+compiler, assembler, and linker, with well thought out options?

Unless you're doing some unusual or strange shit, -O2 should cover everything you need. Are you some Gentoo ricer faggot?

Libraries elsewhere? -I and -L for all your needs.

Warnings? 95% covered by -Wall.

Hard man. Real hard.