GCC 4.7 Moves Along Into Stage 4

GCC 4.7 is still on track with its development plans for an official release in March or April and this popular open-source compiler will deliver on many new features.

Jakub Jelinek shared a status update this week concerning GCC 4.7's development. The GCC trunk has now entered its "stage 4" development stage meaning only regression and documentation fixes are being accepted (GCC 4.7 entered stage 3 last November). When the trunk code-base is "sufficiently stable", the first release candidate will come and they will keep coming until the developers feel the GNU Compiler Collection is in a state for release.

With the status report on the mailing list, bug report counts were also updated. GCC now only has five P1 regressions (the highest priority regressions, and a drop of eight P1 regressions compared to last report), 64 P2 regressions (a drop of 20), and 11 P3 regressions (a drop of 5).

GCC 4.7 will feature more AMD compiler work, improvements to Intel Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge, and Haswell processor support, better support for Google's Go programming language, link-time optimization improvements, inter-procedural optimization improvements, experimental transactional memory support in C, more feature support for the C11 revision, there's better C++11 support, improved libstdc++ support for C++11, ARM Cortex-A7 processor support, and many other improvements.

The first major Linux distribution expected to ship with GCC 4.7 as its default compiler will be Fedora 17, which is gearing up for release in May.