GCC 4.9 Will Make Compilers More Exciting In 2014

GCC 4.9 will likely not be released until later in H1'2014, but already a lot of compiler changes have been queued up to make this next major release of the GNU Compiler Collection exciting for developers and also benefiting users of the generated binaries.

Among the highlights to look forward to right now with GCC 4.9 include:

- The Undefined Behavior Sanitizer has been ported to GCC. The Undefined Behavior Sanitizer (or known more elegantly as UBSAN) allows for detecting undefined behavior at run-time via the -fsanitize=undefined compiler switch for C and C++ code.

- The Address Sanitizer support has now been ported to ARM to complement the x86/x86_64 support. Details on the Address Sanitizer can be found by these Phoronix articles.

- ADA and Fortran have seen upgrades. GNAT now uses ADA 2012 by default over ADA 2005. The Fortran changes are numerous and include supporting Fortran 2003 finalization, Fortran 2008 improvements, and numerous other compiler enhancements.

- Improved C++14 support. There's also more improvements to the C++11 language support.

- RX100, RX200, and RX600 processor support by GCC.

- Intel Silvermont hardware support.

Some other items worth noting include:

- Possible JIT compiler support for a GCC library that provides just-in-time compilation abilities. While the project is still young, it's shown great potential so far.

- OpenMP 4.0 support is ready.

- Intel Cilk Plus multi-threading support will likely be merged in full prior to GCC 4.9.

Stay tuned for continued coverage of the latest GCC compiler developments over the coming weeks and months.