GCC 12.2 Compiler Being Prepared For An August Release

The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) developers are preparing for an August release of GCC 12.2 as the first stable point release update to this year's GCC 12 series.

GCC 12 went stable in May in the form of GCC 12.1 and introduced many new features like AVX-512 FP16 support, continued C2X and C++23 enablement, enhanced RISC-V support, OpenMP 5.0 and OpenACC 2.6 support improvements, Ada 2022 language features, new Arm CPU targets, vectorization now enabled at -O2, and various other improvements for this annual major release of the GNU compiler.

GCC 12.2 is being prepared with the first round of bug fixes to this stable compiler. New feature work continues to be done on trunk for GCC 13 next year while GCC 12.2 is made up just of bug fixes and other selective back-ports.

This week longtime GCC developer Richard Biener of SUSE issued a status report and outlined plans for getting GCC 12.2 out the door. The current plan is to create a GCC 12.2 release candidate on 12 August to still allow roughly two weeks for any further regression fixes and documentation updates to land. After that mid-August release candidate, GCC 12.2 will be released as stable as soon as testing is conducted and no major issues found that would warrant further fixes.

Normally the GCC xx.2 point release comes in July but this one is coming a few weeks later than usual. At least if it still makes the August target should allow time for Linux distributions to pull in this bug/regression-fix compiler update ahead of the autumn Linux distribution launches.