New Features Coming Up For The GCC 4.8 Compiler

Aside from greater C++11 compliance and early C++1y support, GCC 4.8 as the next major Free Software Foundation compiler release will also have many other interesting features.

As outlined on the changes page, there's a lot of stuff piling up for GCC 4.8. Version 4.8 of the GNU Compiler Collection won't be out for several more months, but already there is:

- The -Og optimization level for greater debugging binaries while fast compilation times. (See the recent GCC optimization level benchmarks.)

- A new option (-ftree-partial-pre) for controlling the Partial Redundancy Elimination (PRE) optimization.

- Scalability bottlenecks were removed within GCC's optimization passes that can now lead to significantly faster compilation times with large functions.

- Macro expansion stacks are now displayed by default within the diagnostics for the C language compiler.

- Various new flags for GCC's Fortran compiler.

- Various diagnostics improvements.

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

- The MIPS R4700 processor is now supported by GCC.

- The SPARC hardware support in GCC 4.8 now has optimized instruction scheduling for Oracle's Niagara 4 SPARC processor.

- Its code-base has been converted to C++.

- AMD Steamroller support, a.k.a. Bulldozer 3.