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GCC 5.0 To Support OpenMP 4.0, Intel Cilk Plus, C++14

Posted by Soulskill on from the onward-and-upward dept.

An anonymous reader writes: GCC 5 is coming up for release in the next few weeks and is presenting an extraordinary number of new features: C11 support by default, experimental C++14 support, full C++11 support in libstdc++, OpenMP 4.0 with Xeon Phi / GPU offloading, Intel Cilk Plus multi-threading, new ARM processor support, Intel AVX-512 handling, and much more. This is a big release, so those wishing to test it ahead of time can obtain the preliminary GCC 5 source code from GCC's snapshots mirror.

11 of 57 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Cool to hear I guess by jblues · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Clang/LLVM receives finance and contribution (and therefore an element of control) from Apple. Its also BSD licensed. These are not bad things at all, but its great that GCC, which GNU licensed, is an alternative.

    --
    If it acquires resources on instantiation like a duck, then its a shared_ptr<Duck>
  2. Re:Cool to hear I guess by armanox · · Score: 2

    I'm not looking forward to the compatibility break with other systems. Some of us have to make software work in environments that receive much less love (MIPS, for example).

    --
    I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
  3. Corporations guide the development of GPL ... by perpenso · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Clang/LLVM receives finance and contribution (and therefore an element of control) from Apple. Its also BSD licensed. These are not bad things at all, but its great that GCC, which GNU licensed, is an alternative.

    Corporations guide the development of GPL licensed projects too. Take Linux for example, the main contributors are corporate sponsored/subsidized/etc so therefore the work is directed by corporate needs as well.

    Plus there are indirect effects too. As a corporate sponsored project like Clang/LLVM becomes highly competitive or surpasses a project like GCC then a fire gets lit under GCC to make a little progress, and possibly to add comparable features that were corporate sponsored in Clang/LLVM. So corps get to indirectly influence GCC as it strives to be competitive.

    1. Re:Corporations guide the development of GPL ... by tlhIngan · · Score: 2

      Clang/LLVM receives finance and contribution (and therefore an element of control) from Apple. Its also BSD licensed. These are not bad things at all, but its great that GCC, which GNU licensed, is an alternative.

      Corporations guide the development of GPL licensed projects too. Take Linux for example, the main contributors are corporate sponsored/subsidized/etc so therefore the work is directed by corporate needs as well.

        Plus there are indirect effects too. As a corporate sponsored project like Clang/LLVM becomes highly competitive or surpasses a project like GCC then a fire gets lit under GCC to make a little progress, and possibly to add comparable features that were corporate sponsored in Clang/LLVM. So corps get to indirectly influence GCC as it strives to be competitive.

      Correct, however, the main reason most corps went Clang/LLVM is because of GPLv3. When it was GPLv2, it was well understood and most places tolerated it and used it quite informally inside their workflow processes.

      However, GPLv3 did startle them, and they got worried, big time. It's incompatibility with v2-only code meant that most corporations had to implement formal processes for integrating open-source code (despite license - doesn't matter if it's MIT, Apache, BSD, GPL(v2/v2+/v3/v3+), etc) within their business. It applies regardless of if the code is for external customers, or internal tools - all of a sudden there's a big clampdown on making sure the right code gets used.

      And I've seen new policies that basically state "other than these preapproved projects with these licenses, no further GPL-licensed code is allowed within the company without legal approval and justification".

      GPLv3 basically scared a lot of companies into shaping up, and they basically started running away from the GPL (except when it benefits them - i.e., they release code). So they migrated to Clang/LLVM to avoid the issues.

      Apple was heavily involved early on in order to get Clang and LLVM to a state where it was usable - they saw the GPL writing on the wall and needed to migrate away from GCC, which is why they actually started making strides somewhere along the OS X 10.4 era, with 10.5 having a rudimentary compiler available but not default. I think it took to 10.8 or so before it was formally switched over, and Apple's last commit to GCC involved Grand Central Dispatch support and blocks.

  4. Re:Cool to hear I guess by cold+fjord · · Score: 2, Insightful

    GCC is more than an alternative. It helps keep the commercial vendors on their toes and honest. At some level Linux has performed a similar function regarding commercial Unix vendors.

    --
    much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
  5. 'Support' or Compliance by Bing+Tsher+E · · Score: 2

    Is it C/C++ 'support' or is it standards compliance. That difference matters.

  6. Re:Cool to hear I guess by TheRaven64 · · Score: 3, Informative

    Huh? As a clang contributor, I'd not noticed it being controlled by Apple. I suspect that all of the LLVM/clang developers employed by Qualcomm, ARM, Google, Intel, Facebook, Adobe, and so on would be quite surprised to discover that it's controlled by Apple too.

    Apple has put a lot of development effort into LLVM/Clang over the years because they wanted to be able to use the back end and front end in places where the GPL would not be acceptable (graphics drivers, syntax highlighting in XCode). The rest of the community also benefits from this (if you use a 3D driver with X.org, you're probably using LLVM for the shader compiler, even if you don't use clang as your C compiler), but even at its peak Apple was only just responsible for about half of the development work on LLVM and now it's even less.

    --
    I am TheRaven on Soylent News
  7. ob by Hognoxious · · Score: 2, Funny

    Does it depend on systemd?

    --
    Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
  8. It will, give systemd a few more weeks by mpercy · · Score: 2

    And they'll slurp gcc into systemd too.

  9. Re:Cool to hear I guess by pe1rxq · · Score: 2

    Where and how exactly?

    I know llvm integrates better with IDEs, but I couldn't care less.
    As far as I have seen they produce comparible code. Last time I checked gcc code outperformed llvm code most of the time, but they were very close.

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  10. Re:Cool to hear I guess by mr_mischief · · Score: 2

    Code that compiles reliably under both is likely to be better code than that which compiles only under one or the other.