GCC 4.9.0 Compilers Released with Many New Chips

Jakub Jelinek, on behalf of all the developers of the free GNU Compiler Collection compilers from the Free Software Foundation, has officially announced the release of a new version of GCC 4.9.0.

“One year and one month has passed since the last major version of the GNU Compiler Collection was released,” Jelinek writes, “so it's time to announce a new major release. "GCC 4.9.0 brings important new features not available in GCC 4.8.x or previous versions of GCC."

Among the most important is the support for OpenMP 4.0, the latest version of the programming specifications for multi-core processors. By the way, in LLVM / Clang there is generally no support for at least some version of OpenMP.

Significantly improved the quality of optimization during layout (link-time optimization, LTO), as well as improved some other optimization algorithms, including inter-procedure optimization and optimization with feedback (feedback-directed optimization). For example, thanks to LTO, memory usage during Firefox compilation was reduced from 15 GB to 3.5 GB, and the execution time of this procedure was reduced from 1700 to 350 seconds.

GCC 4.9.0 diagnostic tools now work in color , highlighting error markers, warnings, etc.

Improved support for the C programming language in the ISO C11 standard, and significant work has been done on preliminary support for C ++ 1y (C ++ 14), support for Google Go 1.2.1 has been implemented.

In many ways, support for ARM processors has progressed, including a new local memory register allocator for AArch64, optimization for Cortex-A53 and Cortex-A57 and big.LITTLE architecture, as well as other improvements.

Thanks to a patch from Intel, GCC 4.9.0 supports Advanced Vector Extensions 512 (AVX-512), which will appear in Intel processors no earlier than at the end of 2015. If we talk about support for Intel equipment, then GCC 4.9.0 already knows how to generate binaries optimized for Atom Silvermont processors and Broadwell processors, which Intel will release this year. AMD processors are also not forgotten: the new version of the compiler optimizes the code for the Bulldozer 4 / Excavator APU / CPU processors, although they will be released only in a year.

Added support for IBM Power8 processors.

For a complete list of changes in GCC 4.9.0, see changelog . You can find benchmarks on the Phoronix website comparing the performance of GCC 4.9.0 compared to previous versions and LLVM / Clang.