JIT Compiler Support Might Be Added To GCC 4.9

The recently announced just-in-time (JIT) compiler library using the GNU Compiler Collection might be added to the major GCC 4.9 release in 2014.

At the beginning of the month I wrote about an embeddable GCC JIT compiler that was developed by a Red Hat GCC engineer. With LLVM has long supported JIT compilation, this is a first for GCC. David Malcom published the experimental code that lets GCC have an embeddable JIT compilation API that uses GCC as the compiler back-end and exposes a new libgccjit.so library. The library can be dynamically linked into bytecode interpreters and other programs to generate native, optimized machine code at run-time.

Feedback on this GCC Just-In-Time compiler support has been very positive by developers and enthusiasts. David Malcom started a campaign on the GCC mailing list about the next steps for this project.

David is seeking more code feedback on his idea and the approach for GCC JIT support. He's already aiming to have a GCC JIT mailing list and asking the GCC developers whether this would be good to get it into GCC 4.9 and the steps that would be required. It would take some additional work to get the GCC JIT library readied for GCC 4.9 that will likely happen in H1'2014, plus the approval of release managers / steering committee, but there seems to be some momentum building towards this new GCC JIT option.