GCC 12 Moves On To Stage 4 Development With Many New Compiler Features

GCC 12 as this year's annual GNU Compiler Collection feature release has moved on to "stage four" development with likely releasing GCC 12.1 in April.

This transition was known and marks the end of the stage 3 general bug fixing period now with just focusing exclusively on regression/documentation fixes. This is the final stage focused on getting the next GCC feature release ready for debut.

GCC 12.1 as the first GCC 12 stable release should be out in April if all goes like usual for their past release rhythm. At the moment there are 38 known P1 regressions -- those highest priority regressions -- and 310 P2 regressions and 286 P3 regressions. More details in today's GCC status report.

GCC 12 is set to introduce support for the latest Intel and Arm processors, support for using the Mold linker, x86 straight-line speculation mitigations, RISC-V architecture improvements, Armv9-A enablement, auto vectorization at the -O2 optimization level, AVX-512 FP16 support, improved static analyzer, warnings to fend off the Trojan Source attacks relying on exploiting Unicode control characters, and much more.

One fundamental change made by GCC developers upon entering stage four development was the decision to rename all .c C++ source files comprising the GCC compiler to now using a .cc extension.

Now hitting stage four development, I'll be working on some GCC 12 compiler comparison benchmarks shortly.