More Of What's Landing For The GCC 4.8 Compiler

GCC 4.8 likely won't be released until H1'2013, but there's a number of changes building up for this next release of this leading open-source multi-language compiler.

Recently some of the GCC 4.8 work has been talked about like the Unified Parallel C proposal, the compiler's code-base being converted to C++, improved diagnostics/error reporting, and newer hardware support, but that isn't it.

In the months since the release of GCC 4.7 in March with its own set of prominent changes, many new features and enhancements have been merged for the GNU Compiler Collection.

The GCC 4.8 changes page was recently updated with more of the changes to be found in this next major update -- changes that are both big and small. Below are some of the other GCC 4.8 changes.

- An -ftree-partial-pre option was added for controlling GCC's Partial Redundancy Elimination (PRE) optimization, which is also part of the -O3 optimization level.

- Various new warning flags have been added for the Fortran language support.

- New built-in functions for detecting the CPU run-time type and ISA.

- The GCC MIPS port now passes -mmcu and -mno-mcu to the GCC assembler.

- Several SH improvements.