GCC 4.9 Diagnostics Will Begin Playing With Colors
While GCC 4.8 was released less than two months ago and GCC 4.9 isn't likely to surface until 2014, there's already a new feature to the next major update of the GNU Compiler Collection. GCC 4.9 introduces support for colored outputs in debugging.
With LLVM/Clang offering a great diagnostics experience, GCC developers have been challenged to improve the diagnostics and debugging abilities within their open-source compiler. Introduced with GCC 4.8 were improved diagnostics thanks to the Clang competition and it looks like GCC 4.9 will continue trying to enhance the support for the long-standing Free Software Foundation compiler.
One of the new GCC 4.9 features is support for colorizing GCC diagnostic. There's a new -fdiagnostics-color=auto compiler switch to enable colored outputs to terminals. There's also a GCC_COLORS environment variable to achieve the same effect while also being able to customize the coloring.
The colored diagnostics include prettying the error/warning/note markers, caret line, location information, and quoted strings.
More details on the new GCC color options to be introduced in GCC 4.9 can be found from the online documentation.
With LLVM/Clang offering a great diagnostics experience, GCC developers have been challenged to improve the diagnostics and debugging abilities within their open-source compiler. Introduced with GCC 4.8 were improved diagnostics thanks to the Clang competition and it looks like GCC 4.9 will continue trying to enhance the support for the long-standing Free Software Foundation compiler.
One of the new GCC 4.9 features is support for colorizing GCC diagnostic. There's a new -fdiagnostics-color=auto compiler switch to enable colored outputs to terminals. There's also a GCC_COLORS environment variable to achieve the same effect while also being able to customize the coloring.
The colored diagnostics include prettying the error/warning/note markers, caret line, location information, and quoted strings.
More details on the new GCC color options to be introduced in GCC 4.9 can be found from the online documentation.
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