GNU Compiler Collection 9 (GCC 9) will be formally released in the coming weeks as version 9.1. With GCC 9 are many big improvements as the annual update to this longest serving free software code compiler.

For fans of GNU's Nano text editor, version 4.0 was released this Sunday where overlong lines are no longer automatically hard-wrapped, smooth scrolling has been enabled by default, and other improvements made.

GNU Parallel is a tool for carrying out multiple commands/jobs in parallel on one or more computers. Out today is the GNU Parallel 20190322 release with a few changes over last month's update.

While the release of GCC 9 (v9.1) is just a few weeks away, a late addition to this annual compiler collection update is its C++ standard library now having a C++17 parallel algorithms implementation thanks to Intel developers.

A new release of the GNU "Core Utilities" is out that brings with it the new basenc command.

Besides new/improved CPU targets, C++20 additions, and a lot of other additions to the code-base for GCC 9, there is also continued work on usability improvements for developers to make their lives easier and helping out with more precise error/warning details.

GNU Octave, the numerical computing software package that competes with the likes of MATLAB, is up to version 5.1 with several improvements in tow.

The code for the GNU Debugger "GDB" was branched overnight ahead of the upcoming v8.3 release. This release adds for compilation and injection of C++ code, RISC-V improvements, terminal styling capabilities, and a lot more.

While the GNU Gold linker has been quite promising especially in being faster than the conventional GNU linker, Google developers are no longer actively advancing this linker and thus raising concerns it could begin to suffer from bit-rot.

While the GCC 9 stable compiler release is a few weeks away in the form of GCC 9.1, the GNU Compiler Collection is up to version 8.3.0 today as their newest point release to last year's GCC 8 series.

Of the many free software projects under the GNU umbrella, there aren't many games. One of the only titles is GNU FreeDink, which is out this weekend with its newest update after several active weeks of development.

The GCC 9.1.0 release as the first stable version of GCC 9 is stabilizing at a rate where it should debut by/around April. For those sticking to the GCC 8 series a bit longer, the GCC 8.3.0 compiler update is also on the way.

Daniel Kiper of Oracle presented at last week's FOSDEM European conference on the latest upstream work happening around the GRUB boot-loader.

While in some areas it's still an extremely cold winter, many open-source projects are already preparing for their participation in Google's annual Summer of Code initiative. The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) crew that always tends to see at least a few slots for interested student developers has begun formulating some potential project ideas.

Yesterday I posted some initial benchmarks looking at the performance improvements with Glibc 2.29, the newest feature release of the GNU C Library. Here are more benchmarks on eight different systems using Glibc 2.29 on Clear linux.

One of the sessions we look forward to each year at FOSDEM is in regards to the GNU Hurd status update... It's one of the few times per year where we hear anything new presented on the Hurd. GNU Hurd is nearly three decades old and has yet to see its v1.0 milestone reached, but Samuel Thibault and a small group of other free software developers continue working on this GNU micro-kernel.

After seeing a new GNU C Library release this week, the GNU toolchain has another update with the availability now of Binutils 2.32.

While current-generation Intel/AMD CPUs are still supporting the MMX SIMD instruction set from two decades ago, a set of GCC compiler patches are pending to begin implementing MMX intrinsics using SSE instructions.

Ending out January is the version 2.29 release of the GNU C Library (glibc).

While the LLVM Clang compiler has a -Weverything switch to enable every possible warning, it's unlikely the GNU Compiler Collection will offer a similar option.

CVE-2016-10739 has been around since April 2016 as implied by the number and finally today this security issue has been fixed in the Git development code for the upcoming Glibc 2.29 GNU C Library.

A new release of the GNU Binutils programming tools will soon be available. The upcoming Binutils 2.32 release is primarily made up of new CPU ports.

One of the GCC compiler features unfortunately not taken advantage of by most Linux distributions is FMV - Function Multi-Versioning. FMV is what allows for the compilation of different tuned code paths depending upon the processor and for the particular code-path to be chosen at run-time, i.e. optimizing to your heart's content with AVX, SSE4, and other instruction set extensions and compiling all of that into a single binary and for the preferred code path to be taken depending upon the CPU running the binary so it will still run on older CPUs as well as today's most powerful processors.

With GCC 9 being released in just a short time and being now onto the final stage of development, besides fixing regressions the developers are also getting the documentation in order.

The AMD Radeon "GCN" compiler back-end to the GCC open-source code compiler might still be merged ahead of the GCC 9 stable release due out in April.

The release of the upcoming GNU Bash 5.0 shell release is now available. Bash 5.0 is packing various fixes over Bash 4.4 but also a number of new features and improvements to better conform to POSIX specifications.

GNUstep, the long-standing implementation of Apple's Cocoa/Objective-C frameworks as open-source and supported on Linux, BSDs, and other platforms, started off 2019 with some new releases. GNUstep GUI 0.27, GNUstep Base 1.26, and GNUstep GUI Backend 0.27 are the new releases out today.

SUSE's Richard Biener announced this morning that "stage three" development on GCC 9 is now over, which means all that's left before releasing it as GCC 9.1 is to carry out more regression and documentation fixes.

Longtime GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) developer Jan Hubicka of SUSE is looking at enabling vectorization as part of the -O2 optimization level for Intel Core, AMD Zen, and generic x86_64 CPU targets.

Back in November is when ARM Holdings posted their GCC compiler support for "Ares", their forthcoming new ARMv8 core design intended for HPC/server SoCs. Ares continues inching closer to launch while now the GNU Assembler has picked up support for recognizing Ares.