GCC's New Ranger Infrastructure Aims To Be In Good Shape For GCC 11

Making waves just over a year ago in the GNU Compiler Collection community was the "Ranger" project for on-demand range generator that's been worked on for several years at Red Hat. While their goals for GCC 10 didn't pan out, it's looking like in the next few months more of the Ranger infrastructure will land and thus putting it in the window for GCC 11.

Ranger allows for querying range information on-demand for SSA names/variables from within anywhere in the IL with minimal overhead, among other benefits to the compiler internals.

The Red Hat compiler experts hope to have the multi-range support ready as "imminent" and is currently being tested by doing a complete rebuild of Fedora with those passes enabled. Performance results with Ranger are expected soon.

The bulk of Ranger though is aiming to be ready "mid-August" and could be mainlined soon after the GCC multi-range support lands. The current plan is to enable Ranger for a few client passes More performance details should be ready when those patches are submitted.

Additional Ranger code is then slated to be ready around mid-September and following that any other remaining items. More details via this mailing list post.

If those plans are met, Ranger should be in good standing for the debut of GCC 11 early next year.