Intel Is Ready For Merging Cilk Plus Into GCC

Intel developers are planning to merge Cilk Plus support into the mainline GCC code-base.

Cilk Plus from Intel is a C/C++ language extension that's intended for multi-threaded parallel computing. Cilk Plus in its current form comes out of Intel's 2009 acquisition of the Cilk Arts company with the Cilk++ programming language. Cilk Plus is designed to offer many improvements over multi-threaded programming with OpenMP.

Back in 2011 is when Intel ported Cilk Plus to GCC for easy parallel programming. Aside from the Cilk Plus changes to GCC, Intel also offers the Cilk Plus run-time, which is dual-licensed with a BSD version. Cilk Plus was also talked about this year at the GCC 2012 Cauldron.

Balaji V. Iyer of Intel is now calling for Intel's GCC branch with Cilk Plus support to be merged to trunk, per his mailing list message. "The Cilk-Plus branch is feature-complete. Programs using Cilk Plus constructs get great performance on vector and multicore hardware. Programs that don't use the new language features (enabled by a -fcilkplus flag) see no change. For details please see http://cilkplus.org. It's time to promote the branch into mainline. Cilk Plus branch is stable and there is no unexpected failures with respect to the trunk in regression testsuites. Most of the changes are in the front and middle-end. Since it involves many changes, I plan to break it up into individual patches (listed below), each of which adds a new, complete capability. Later patches sometimes use the functionality added by the previous one."

The Cilk Plus support would then be officially introduced next year with GCC 4.8. More Cilk Plus details are available from the Intel Software web-site.