OpenIndiana Has Upgraded To The GCC 6 Compiler

The OpenSolaris/Illumos-based OpenIndiana operating system has finally moved past GCC 4.9 as its base user-land compiler and is now using GCC 6.4.

This comes while GCC 8.1 should be officially released in the next few weeks and they are already targeting GCC 7.3.0 as their next illumos-gate compiler.

As of this week, all packages in the main/encumbered repositories have been rebuilt using GCC 6.4 and the role of GCC 4.9 is limited to just compiling itself and illumos-gcc.Meanwhile, the reference compiler for illumos-gate and gfx-drm is still with GCC 4.4.4.

OpenIndiana users wishing to learn more about this long overdue compiler upgrade can do so via the OI blog.