GCC 9.1 RC2 Released Ahead Of Friday's Compiler Debut With Zen 2, Cascadelake Support

Barring any glaring bugs being discovered in the next few days, GCC 9.1 will be released on Friday as the first stable release of the GCC 9 compiler.

The first GCC 9.1 release candidate came last week after the GNU Compiler Collection reached no "P1" regressions that are of the highest priority and must be cleared out before the annual compiler release.

GCC 9.1-RC1 has been doing well and now today release manager Jakub Jelinek of Red Hat released GCC 9.1 RC2. Jakub says the official GCC 9.1.0 release is still on track for likely releasing on Friday, 3 May.

There are many improvements and new additions with GCC 9 including Intel Cascadelake support (enabling AVX-512 VNNI compared to the Skylake AVX-512 target), initial AMD Zen 2 support though not yet fully tuned, various new Intel extensions, partial support for OpenMP 5.0, initial support for the D programming language with its front-end finally being merged, continued experimental work on C++2A language support, various ARM improvements, OpenRISC support was merged, and many other features.

GCC 9 is set to be another exciting compiler update and has been working out well in our testing of the development state in recent months. GCC 9 is already shipping early in Fedora 30 while Ubuntu users will need to wait until 19.10 and other Linux distributions on their respective release schedules. GCC 10 development meanwhile is already open on master.