GCC 4.9 Continues Piling On New Features

When GCC 4.9 is released in 2014 it will be coming in hot on new features with a large assortment of improvements and new functionality for the open-source compiler.

There's been many GCC 4.9 articles already on Phoronix covering the very latest developments. While GCC 4.9.0 is still months away from being christened, here's a recap of some of the really great features of this next major compiler release from the Free Software Foundation.

- OpenMP 4.0 support has been committed for the popular multi-processing specification.

- Intel Cilk Plus multi-threading support has been committed and is still being improved.

- Intel Bay Trail / Silvermont support exposed via the -march=slm compiler switch.

- GCC 4.9 has been ported tro the NDS32. NDS32 is a 32-bit architecture from Andes Technology. The AndesCore processor SoCs are designed for embedded applications.

- The Undefined Behavior Sanitizer has been added to GCC after being ported from LLVM.

- The Address Sanitizer has new support like GCC on ARM.

- ADA and Fortran language updates. The ADA language changes also include GNAT defaulting to ADA 2012 by default over ADA 2005.

- Improved C++14 support although the specification isn't yet finalized for the "C++1y" language.

- The libstdc++ run-time library has improved C++11 / C++14 support.

- Improved C11 support.

- The x86 intrinsics have been improved and is now more beneficial with function multi-versioning.

- Improved diagnostics output. GCC can now play with colors!

Other work that hasn't yet hit the SVN trunk code-base but should make it includes AMD Bulldozer 4 / Excavator (bdver4) support and possible OpenACC support. There also might be JIT compiler support and Java might be disabled by default but those features aren't set in stone yet for 4.9.

GCC 4.9 will likely be released in H1'2014 based upon past timing but no concrete plans have been laid yet. More GCC 4.9 details are available from GNU.org.