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GCC 3.4.0 Released

Posted by timothy on from the deep-infrastructure dept.

AaronW writes "While checking the GCC website I saw that GCC version 3.4 was officially released on April 18th. Version 3.4 includes numerous changes and enhancements, including better optimization, and the ability to build a profiled version of gcc which is 7.5-11% faster on i386 hardware. Be kind and please use one of the mirror sites."

12 of 68 comments (clear)

  1. Not officially released yet by RML · · Score: 5, Informative

    This announcement is premature, it's still propagating to mirrors; the "announcment" is an error. The official release will be tomorrow.

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    Human/Ranger/Zangband
  2. new feature by Tumbleweed · · Score: 4, Funny

    "precompiled announcements"

  3. but who by mithras+the+prophet · · Score: 4, Funny

    is still using a 386 anymore??? Get with the times, gcc! ;)

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  4. Ideally... by me98411 · · Score: 5, Funny

    Ideally no one would have noticed until tomorrow, when the official announcement will go out..

    They did not think about /., did they?

  5. Profiling shared libraries by wowbagger · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Has the ability to profile shared libraries been fixed? I have tried to do this, and even if you compile a shared library with -pg, and specify it in the LD_PROFILE environment variable, the resulting profile file cannot be processed by gprof V2.4 - instead you get "error: unsupported profile revision 131,071"

    I *really* need to profile a shared library, and building it as a staticly linked executable is not an option.

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  6. Thanks by Markus+Registrada · · Score: 4, Informative
    I don't know about the other bundled compilers, but the 3.4 C++ compiler and library are the best ever in Gcc, by far.

    If you run across them, be sure to thank Paolo Carlini, Petur Runolfsson, and Jerry Quinn for making 3.4 iostreams as fast as (and often faster than) Glibc's stdio. Thank them, too for making filebuf support large files (>2G) natively without any code or build changes needed, on any target that allows them.

    Worth noting, too, is that this is the first release in which the library is part of the ABI. Every previous release since 2.95 has had to increment the libstdc++.so version number, but future 3.4 (and maybe 3.5) releases should be backward compatible. Ask your distribution maintainers to ship 3.4-built versions of all C++ libraries they package, so that they will be compatible with programs built with this and future releases.

  7. Broken C++ ABI ... again by Lumpish+Scholar · · Score: 4, Informative

    They broke binary compatibility in gcc 3.0, and again in 3.2, and now in 3.4.

    What do you think the outlook is for binary compatibility with 3.6?

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    1. Re:Broken C++ ABI ... again by Dr.Dubious+DDQ · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Well, if you want to be technical about it, it's not "Broken" C++ ABI, but a "Finally fixed, even though that makes it no longer bug-for-bug compatible with older GCC C++ ABI's"...

      As I understand it, they've been working towards a more standards compliant C++ implementation, and that's why the binary compatibility gets lost.

      I am, though, hoping that there was NOT a loss of compatibility between the 3.3.3 that I'm using now and the 3.4 series. Will find out once I clean off enough disk space to finish compiling up slack packages for myself...

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  8. Re:WTF? by jhunsake · · Score: 5, Funny

    6) No screenshots

  9. Re:GCJ by rmathew · · Score: 4, Informative
    Swing/AWT using Gtk+ peers has been making tremendous progress in the last few months thanks to a bunch of Red Hat hackers and is quite usable as can be seen here for example.

    Unfortunately, these changes are not a part of the 3.4.0 release of GCC/GCJ and will only be available from 3.5.0 (or 4.0.0, as the case might be).

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    rmathew.com
  10. New Features by AT · · Score: 4, Informative
    In addition to the usual bug fixes, there are some cool new features in gcc 3.4. Here is the full list; some of the more interesting stuff:
    • unit (file) at a time compilation with -funit-at-a-time; now gcc can finally do some limited global (cross-function) optimization
    • profile feedback (-fprofile-generate -fprofile-use options) that allows gcc to optimize based on feedback from runtime
    • precompiled header files for huge compilation speed gains
    • C++ now much closer to ISO standard
  11. Re:Fixed C++ ABI ... finally by cimetmc · · Score: 4, Informative
    A post above contradicts this, so I may be wrong about this...but I DO think I was remembering the binary incompatibility occurring in the 3.3 series correctly in this case. (My impression is that 3.4 doesn't have too many 'new features' beyond 3.3, but had more of a focus on optimizing the compile speed of 3.3.)

    Well, you are wrong in a number of ways:

    1) Like you already noticed yourself, GCC doesn't have the even/odd numbered version logic of Linux. Each version number is a release version. Development versions have the next release version with a date attached to the version. The development process is formalized and is described here

    2) GCC 3.4 is a regular new version with a number of new features. It is certainly not a minor version with just some compile speed tuning. I would consider the changes from 3.3 to 3.4 bigger than the previous changes from 3.2 to 3.3.

    3) The real oddball in the GCC 3.x series is GCC 3.2.x. This is just a bugfix version of GCC 3.1. However as some of the bugs fixed were a major C++ ABI issue and fixing those bugs lead to incompatibility, the GCC developers decicded to exceptionally increment the version number not following the regular release scheme.

    Marcel