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.