GCC 4.9 Is Working Towards A Possible Release In April

While GCC 4.9 is running behind schedule compared to where GCC 4.8 was at this time last year, open-source developers banding together still might get out the GNU Compiler Collection 4.9 release in early April with its many new compiler features.

In a status update issued late last week by Red Hat's Jakub Jelinek, the GCC 4.9 code-base is still in "stage four" and only receiving regression fixes and documentation updates. Jakub then went on to say in his mailing list post, "Comparing to last year's status reports, we are something in between a fortnight and month behind the last year's schedule, but if enough attention is given to the remaining P1 blockers, we could still release around the beginning of April."

GCC 4.8.0 was released in late March of last year with GCC having been on a cycle of seeing a major compiler update about once per year. With GCC 4.9 as the 2014 update for the Free Software Foundation's compiler there is LTO improvements, IPO improvements, feedback-directed optimization improvements, OpenMP 4.0 support, ISO C11 support on par with C99, continued C++1y (C++14) support, ISO C++14 work for libstdc++, Go 1.2.1 language support, Intel AVX 512 support, Intel Broadwell and SIlvermont CPU support, AMD Excavator CPU support, and many other changes. Read more about the many new features and improvements to GCC 4.9. We'll be back with more feature articles and compiler benchmarks for x86 and ARM as the GCC 4.9 release approaches in April.