GCC 9 Will Be Released Soon With AMD Zen 2 Support, Radeon GCN Back-End, D Language

GNU Compiler Collection 9 (GCC 9) will be formally released in the coming weeks as version 9.1. With GCC 9 are many big improvements as the annual update to this longest serving free software code compiler.

Some of the highlights for the upcoming GCC 9 release include:

- Partial support for OpenMP 5.0 in C/C++.

- Experimental support for the C++2A specification via the -std=c++2a or -std=gnu++2a switches. Along similar lines, libstdc++ has improved support for C++2A as well as some C++17 improvements, including incomplete/experimental Filesystem TS and Networking TS. There is also Intel's initial code for C++17 parallel algorithms.

- Support for the D programming language was finally merged.

- Many Ada front-end enhancements.

- Initial AMD Zen 2 CPU support (znver2).

- Support for the Arm Neoverse N1, Cortex-A76/A55, and other Cortex hardware.

- ARMv8.5 Branch Target Identification support and speculation tracking support.

- The AMD GCN back-end was merged albeit for GCC 9 can only run basic single-threaded programs while hopefully for GCC 10 we'll see enough support to begin running OpenMP/OpenACC offloading. In GCC 9, the AMD GCN back-end is designed for Fiji and Vega 10 hardware.

- The C-SKY processor back-end was added, similar to the C-SKY enablement recently in the Linux kernel and elsewhere.

- OpenRISC support after that port was rewritten.

- A new live-patching option has been added to help in the Linux kernel's live-patching effort.

- Better bash auto-completion support from the shell via a new --completion option.

- Various diagnostic improvements, including the ability to dump diagnostics to JSON format.

- Fortran adds asynchronous I/O support and many other improvements.

- Intel PTWRITE support.

- Intel MPX (Memory Protection Extensions) support was dropped.

- Solaris 10 support has been deprecated and will be removed in GCC 10 should no stakeholders step up.