GCC 5.0 Compiler Might Be On The Way

GCC developers have brought up the topic of tagging a GCC 5.0 release soon based upon recent changes.

GCC 4.8 is expected to be the next GNU Compiler Collection release due out in early 2013 for this leading open-source compiler. Right now it's nearing the end of stage-one development and will be proceeded by a period of bug-fixing. However, some developers are bringing up talk of GCC 5.0.

Back in 2010 it was talked about to save the GCC 5.0 release for the first version to get rid of reload while it was brought up today that merging LRA into GCC might count even though the Local Register Allocator doesn't eliminate reload completely yet. LRA was just merged a number of days ago into mainline GCC. "I suppose LRA counts, even if it doesn't get rid of reload completely just yet. Bump the number! :-)"

Google's Ian Lance Taylor then said that its code-base conversion to C++ from C would also be significant for a version bump to GCC 5.0. "Also the fact that GCC is now written in C++ seems to me to be deserving of a bump to 5.0. So now we have two reasons!" The code-base conversion to C++ happened just a few months ago after the GCC 4.7 release.

In the past there was also talk that GCC 5.0 would be more modular like LLVM. We'll see what happens and whether a GCC 5.0 release ends up happening in the not too distant future.