GCC's JIT Library Is No Longer Considered "Alpha" Quality

Written by Michael Larabel in GNU on 24 January 2021 at 12:15 AM EST. 1 Comment
GNU
With the upcoming GCC 11 compiler release the GNU compiler's just-in-time (JIT) library is no longer considered to be of alpha quality.

Libgccjit is considered production quality with GCC 11. GCC 5 was released nearly six years ago already and with that release came the introduction of this GCC JIT library initially developed by Red Hat's compiler experts. It was initially written as an embed-friendly library, to be used by bytecode interpreters and other potential use-cases with there even having been an experimental Python compiler.

Now with GCC 11, libgccjit is removing its "alpha" label. Red Hat's David Malcom who has been leading the libgccjit effort wrote the patch dropping the alpha label. This promotion is coming as the library continues to be maintained, it's been API/ABI stable since merging, and is used by multiple projects.

Among the users of this GCC JIT library are the Ravi Lua-inspired language, an experimental GNU Octave JIT implementation, Coconut as an experimental JIT for CPython 3, an experimental back-end for PyPy's JIT, and AOT compilation for Emacs bytecode. There also exist bindings of libgccjit to Python, Perl, Rust, and other languages.

A tutorial on this JIT library and other documentation around it can be found via gcc.gnu.org.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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