openSUSE Tumbleweed Prepares To Jump On GCC 12

As of this week with openSUSE's Tumbleweed rolling-release distribution it is using GCC 12's libgcc standard libraries and preparing to shift to GCC 12 as the default compiler once ready.

GCC 12 will make its stable debut in the coming weeks in the form of GCC 12.1. Given SUSE being among the most active contributors to the GNU Compiler Collection, to no surprise they are quickly looking to upgrade openSUSE Tumbleweed to this annual major compiler release.

The 5 April updates to Tumbleweed now make use of GCC 12's libgcc standard libraries and will be the default compiler at a "later date" -- likely shortly after GCC 12.1 is officially christened. More details on this week's openSUSE Tumbleweed updates via news.opensuse.org.

The soon-to-be-released Fedora 36 is already on the near-final GCC 12 snapshot as its default system compiler. Other rolling-release distributions like Intel's Clear Linux are also preparing for this GNU Compiler Collection release. More conservative distributions like Ubuntu won't see GCC 12 by default until their 22.10 release in the autumn.

GCC 12 enables vectorization now at the -O2 optimization level, improves OpenMP 5.0/5.1 support, implements additional C++23 and C2X language functionality, libstdc++ improves its C++20/C++23 support, improvements to the GCC JIT, adding support for newer Arm CPU cores, adds Intel AVX512-FP16 support, x86 SLS mitigation is introduced, and many other compiler additions and improvements.