GCC 4.8 Nearing End Of Stage One Development

The GCC trunk is nearing the completion of stage one development for the GCC 4.8 release due out in early 2013.

Red Hat's Jakub Jelinek issued a new 4.8.0 status report where he mentions "I'd like to close the stage 1 phase of GCC 4.8 development on Monday, November 5th. If you have still patches for new features you'd like to see in GCC 4.8, please post them for review soon. Patches posted before the freeze, but reviewed shortly after the freeze, may still go in, further changes should be just bugfixes and documentation fixes."

In terms of bug counts, there's now 23 new P1 bugs (the highest priority), 8 new P2 bugs with a total count of 77, and 84 new P3 bugs.

Stage one of development is the initial development point for new GNU Compiler Collection releases where new features and major changes are merged. The next stage is three (with Stage 2 having been abandoned since GCC 4.4) where only documentation updates are permitted, bug-fixes, and new architecture ports that don't touch existing ports code. Stage 3 lasts for approximately two months before the compiler release goes gold.

There's many features coming to GCC 4.8, including ARM 64-bit AArch64, the Local Register Allocator, and greater C++11 support.