GCC Prepares To Drop Support For CompactRISC CR16

After being marked as obsolete in GCC 12, GNU Compiler Collection developers are now preparing to remove compiler support for the CompactRISC CR16 architecture in GCC 13.

Martin Liška of SUSE has sent out the patches that remove the CR16 compiler port from the GCC tree, lightening this open-source compiler code-base by over seven thousand lines of code. The CompactRISC CR16 architecture is from National Semiconductor, now owned by TI, and licensed for use within micro-controllers.

With TI no longer even offering software support/services for the CR16 and no one from the open-source community stepping up to show interest in CR16 after it was marked obsolete in GCC 12, the GCC developers are planning to just remove the support entirely.

Martin's patch sent out this morning completes that removal and looks like it will soon be merged. GCC 13 with this and other changes will be out as stable in the first few months of 2023.