GCC 4.9 Stacks Up ADA, Fortran Changes

GCC 4.9 isn't anticipated for release until H1'2014, but it's already been stacking up changes for several months. We have covered some of the new GCC 4.9 work already on Phoronix for this open-source compiler, but here's an overview of some of the other changes.

Among the changes covered so far for the GCC 4.9 compiler, which will compete with the LLVM/Clang 3.4 compiler due out at the end of this year, includes:

- Colored diagnostics support.

- Continued support for recent CPUs and their new instruction set extensions, including Intel "Core-AVX2" Haswell.

- Better support for C++14, the next evolutionary standard to the C++ programming language.

- Intel Silvermont CPU support.

Some other GNU Compiler Collection 4.9 improvements that have already been merged into their SVN code-base but not yet covered on Phoronix includes:

- The GNAT ADA compiler that is part of GCC will now default to the ADA 2012 language. Up to now the ADA 2005 standard has been the default, but GCC 4.9 will up it to the latest 2012 specification. ADA 2012 presents improved concurrency / multi-core support, container enhancements, increased expressiveness, and other new features.

- Support for Solaris 9 has been obsoleted.

- AddressSanitizer is supported by the ARM target in GCC 4.9. AddressSanitizer was ported from LLVM in GCC 4.8 for x86 architectures and with this new release it will work for GCC on ARM hardware.

- The GCC Fortran compiler now supports "Finalization" from the Fortran 2003 language and there's also changes for Fortran 2008. Various other Fortran compiler changes are also present.

More details on the current GCC 4.9 changes are outlined in the online documentation at gcc.gnu.org.