The Big Features & Improvements Of The GCC 8 Compiler

The GCC 8 compiler will likely be introduced as stable this week or next in the form of the GCC 8.1 premiere release. Here's a look at the prominent changes for this annual update to the GNU Compiler Collection.

Among the changes you can look forward to in the imminent GCC 8.1 stable release over the GCC 7 series includes:

- Intel Cannonlake support albeit it now looks like those CPUs won't be shipping until volume until possibly the start of 2019. And GCC 8 also has initial targeting for Intel Icelake, Cannonlake's successor.

- Intel CET support for Control-flow Enforcement Technology.

- Continued tuning for AMD Zen "znver1" microarchitecture.

- ARMv8.4-A support as well as now officially supporting the ARM Cortex-A55 and Cortex-A75 CPUs.

- Qualcomm Saphira CPU support, Qualcomm's new ARM server CPU core.

- Initial C17 language support and on the C++ side is initial work towards C++2A.

- Libstdc++ has improved experimental support for C++17 and experimental support for C++2A/C++20.

- Preparations for Fortran 2018.

- Various work around Spectre mitigation for different architectures.

- Updated Golang implementation, matching Go 1.10.1.

- Correct -march=native handling on ARM/AArch64.

- Intel Cilk Plus support was dropped while separately Intel MPX (Memory Protection Extensions) was deprecated and will likely be dropped in GCC 9.

- The AMD HSA IL / BRIG support was further improved with greater performance optimizations and more stability.

- Continued work on more helpful debug messages.

Stay tuned for more GCC 8 coverage and compiler benchmarking in the coming days on Phoronix.