GCC 14 Feature Development Ends Next Month

One month from today the GCC 14 feature development is expected to end as the GNU compiler developers transition to the bug-fixing stage.

In yesterday's status report for GCC 14, release manager Richard Biener of SUSE confirmed that on 19 November will mark the transition from general development mode to that of the "stage 3" general bug-fixing mode. On 4 January is when GCC 14 will then move to "stage 4" development of regression and documentation fixing only.

Thus there's one month to go to get in any major new features for GCC 14 otherwise will be diverted to GCC 15. The November point of transitioning to bug-fixing mode is common for the GNU Compiler Collection with its annual release cadence. GCC 14.1 as the first stable GCC 14 compiler release in turn should be released in the March~April timeframe of next year.

It will be interesting to see what last minute feature code may materialize for GCC 14 if any further C/C++ features are committed in time, what hardware enablement code comes, and related to that whether we end up seeing any AMD Zen 5 "znver5" target enablement happen for GCC 14 or not. GCC 14 has already landed a lot when it comes to Intel CPUs being released over the next two years, initial APX and AVX10 support, more C23 features, initial C++26 plumbing, new Arm features, RISC-V crypto extensions, and a variety of other improvements.

As of yesterday's status report there are 37 known P1 regressions -- issues of the highest priority -- and another 501 P2 regressions and 208 P3 regressions.