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GCC 4.9 To See Significant Upgrades In 2014

noahfecks writes "It seems that the GCC developers are taking steps to roll out significant improvements after CLANG became more competitive. 'Among the highlights to look forward to right now with GCC 4.9 are: The Undefined Behavior Sanitizer has been ported to GCC; Ada and Fortran have seen upgrades; Improved C++14 support; RX100, RX200, and RX600 processor support; and Intel Silvermont hardware support.'"

7 of 191 comments (clear)

  1. Re:C99 Anytime Soon? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Most projects don't use C99 anyway.

    So your defense is that gcc users don't use features unimplemented in gcc?

  2. Re:4.8.2 is not even 2 weeks old by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    What's your point? 4.8.2 is the second bugfix/stabilization release of 4.8.0 which was released in March this year. Should they stop releasing bug fixes as soon as they start developing the next generation compiler? Should they refrain from any new developments until the old version has proven to be bug free?

    What's wrong with continuing development that will likely result in a new version release next year?

  3. Re:Irony not lost on me by mean+pun · · Score: 5, Informative

    No Apple is pushing CLANG for exactly the reason that they want to use BSD license in a take not give fashion...how hackable is it; Xcode(SDK) will only work on Mac OS X. Looking forward to proprietary extensions :)

    Huh? Apple is putting a lot of work in llvm (the general compiler framework), and they give that work away under the BSD license. They are most certainly not only taking, they are also giving a lot. llvm is highly portable, and is certainly not restricted to Mac OS X (or C/C++ compilation, for that matter). In fact, lots of BSD distributions (and Minix) use llvm as their compiler of choice, because they don't want GPLed software. Similarly, clang (the c/c++ compiler on top of llvm) is highly portable, under a BSD license, and Apple is putting a lot of work in it. Moreover, Apple is eating its own dog food, and using llvm/clang to compile most of Mac OS X, which is a solid guarantee for the quality of the resulting compiler, and is therefore another highly significant contribution.

    It is true that Xcode (the Integrated Development Environment (IDE)) is not free, but that does not diminish the contributions that Apple is making to llvm and clang.

  4. Re:Biggest boon to GCC: lack of hackability by serviscope_minor · · Score: 5, Interesting

    ...which is exactly why some folks are flocking to CLANG.

    People are flocking to CLANG for a variety of reasons. A large part seems to be because for some reason the GNU tools have become deeply unfashionable.

    LLVM has some structural advantages (due to being youger), but despite that all, GCC is comfortable keeping ahead of CLANG in both the optermizer and C++ support, so it cant be that bad.

    Sure, not everyone wants to extend/modify his compiler, but actively preventing people from reusing your code isn't exactly what you should do if you want to keep a community thriving.

    RMS is but one voice on the steering committee. He can say what he wants (and does), but the committee doesn't have to listen.

    That sad, when taking the long term into account, his whacky ranting and raving has the sad tendency to come true.

    --
    SJW n. One who posts facts.
  5. I will not utter it here by Hognoxious · · Score: 5, Funny

    If you're trying to imply that Java is the new Fortran you couldn't be more wrong.

    It's the new C080L.

    --
    Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
  6. Re:GCC still has a long way to go... by loufoque · · Score: 5, Insightful

    As a member of both the C and C++ standards committees, and as a CEO of a company that sells C++ libraries to businesses for high-performance computing, I have to disagree with you.

    The Oracle/Sun and IBM compilers are the worst C++ compilers available.
    Intel is also pretty bad, despite touting good standards conformance and being designed for runtime speed, it deals very badly with abstraction penalties, and is extremely slow to compile.
    Microsoft's compiler is also pretty bad, both at compilation speed, standards conformance, and runtime speed, with each new version introducing quirks and regressions (they have acknowledged major codegen regressions in the recent releases and are investigating them)

    If you want a good C++ compiler, GCC or Clang are the only tools available.

  7. Re:Irony not lost on me by Goaway · · Score: 5, Informative

    As the other guy says, Apple created clang from scratch. You are confusing it with LLVM, which is its backend.