This file contains information about GCC releases which has been generated automatically from the online release notes. It covers releases of GCC (and the former EGCS project) since EGCS 1.0, on the line of development that led to GCC 3. For information on GCC 2.8.1 and older releases of GCC 2, see ONEWS. ====================================================================== http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.6/index.html GCC 4.6 Release Series October 26, 2011 The [1]GNU project and the GCC developers are pleased to announce the release of GCC 4.6.2. This release is a bug-fix release, containing fixes for regressions in GCC 4.6.1 relative to previous releases of GCC. Release History GCC 4.6.2 October 26, 2011 ([2]changes) GCC 4.6.1 June 27, 2011 ([3]changes) GCC 4.6.0 March 25, 2011 ([4]changes) References and Acknowledgements GCC used to stand for the GNU C Compiler, but since the compiler supports several other languages aside from C, it now stands for the GNU Compiler Collection. A list of [5]successful builds is updated as new information becomes available. The GCC developers would like to thank the numerous people that have contributed new features, improvements, bug fixes, and other changes as well as test results to GCC. This [6]amazing group of volunteers is what makes GCC successful. For additional information about GCC please refer to the [7]GCC project web site or contact the [8]GCC development mailing list. To obtain GCC please use [9]our mirror sites or [10]our SVN server. For questions related to the use of GCC, please consult these web pages and the [11]GCC manuals. If that fails, the [12]gcc-help@gcc.gnu.org mailing list might help. Comments on these web pages and the development of GCC are welcome on our developer list at [13]gcc@gcc.gnu.org. All of [14]our lists have public archives. Copyright (C) [15]Free Software Foundation, Inc. Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium, provided this notice is preserved. These pages are [16]maintained by the GCC team. Last modified 2011-10-26[17]. References 1. http://www.gnu.org/ 2. http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.6/changes.html 3. http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.6/changes.html 4. http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.6/changes.html 5. http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.6/buildstat.html 6. http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Contributors.html 7. http://gcc.gnu.org/index.html 8. mailto:gcc@gcc.gnu.org 9. http://gcc.gnu.org/mirrors.html 10. http://gcc.gnu.org/svn.html 11. http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/ 12. mailto:gcc-help@gcc.gnu.org 13. mailto:gcc@gcc.gnu.org 14. http://gcc.gnu.org/lists.html 15. http://www.fsf.org/ 16. http://gcc.gnu.org/about.html 17. http://validator.w3.org/check/referer ====================================================================== http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.6/changes.html GCC 4.6 Release Series Changes, New Features, and Fixes Caveats * The options -b and -V have been removed because they were unreliable. Instead, users should directly run -gcc when cross-compiling, or -gcc- to run a different version of gcc. * GCC now has stricter checks for invalid command-line options. In particular, when gcc was called to link object files rather than compile source code, it would previously accept and ignore all options starting with --, including linker options such as --as-needed and --export-dynamic, although such options would result in errors if any source code was compiled. Such options, if unknown to the compiler, are now rejected in all cases; if the intent was to pass them to the linker, options such as -Wl,--as-needed should be used. * Versions of the GNU C library up to and including 2.11.1 included an [1]incorrect implementation of the cproj function. GCC optimizes its builtin cproj according to the behavior specified and allowed by the ISO C99 standard. If you want to avoid discrepancies between the C library and GCC's builtin transformations when using cproj in your code, use GLIBC 2.12 or later. If you are using an older GLIBC and actually rely on the incorrect behavior of cproj, then you can disable GCC's transformations using -fno-builtin-cproj. * The C-only intermodule optimization framework (IMA, enabled by -combine) has been removed in favor of the new generic link-time optimization framework (LTO) introduced in [2]GCC 4.5.0. * GCC now ships with the LGPL-licensed libquadmath library, which provides quad-precision mathematical functions for targets with a __float128 datatype. __float128 is available for targets on 32-bit x86, x86-64 and Itanium architectures. The libquadmath library is automatically built on such targets when building the Fortran compiler. * New -Wunused-but-set-variable and -Wunused-but-set-parameter warnings were added for C, C++, Objective-C and Objective-C++. These warnings diagnose variables respective parameters which are only set in the code and never otherwise used. Usually such variables are useless and often even the value assigned to them is computed needlessly, sometimes expensively. The -Wunused-but-set-variable warning is enabled by default by -Wall flag and -Wunused-but-set-parameter by -Wall -Wextra flags. * Support for a number of older systems and recently unmaintained or untested target ports of GCC has been declared obsolete in GCC 4.6. Unless there is activity to revive them, the next release of GCC will have their sources permanently removed. All GCC ports for the following processor architectures have been declared obsolete: + Argonaut ARC (arc-*) + National Semiconductor CRX (crx-*) + Motorola 68HC11 and 68HC12 (m68hc11-*-*, m6811-*-*, m68hc12-*-*, m6812-*-*) + Sunplus S+core (score-*) The following ports for individual systems on particular architectures have been obsoleted: + Interix (i[34567]86-*-interix3*) + NetWare x86 (i[3456x]86-*-netware*) + Generic ARM PE (arm-*-pe* other than arm*-wince-pe*) + MCore PE (mcore-*-pe*) + SH SymbianOS (sh*-*-symbianelf*) + GNU Hurd on Alpha and PowerPC (alpha*-*-gnu*, powerpc*-*-gnu*) + M68K uClinux old ABI (m68k-*-uclinuxoldabi*) + a.out NetBSD (arm*-*-netbsd*, i[34567]86-*-netbsd*, vax-*-netbsd*, but not *-*-netbsdelf*) The i[34567]86-*-pe alias for Cygwin targets has also been obsoleted; users should configure for i[34567]86-*-cygwin* instead. Certain configure options to control the set of libraries built with GCC on some targets have been obsoleted. On ARM targets, the options --disable-fpu, --disable-26bit, --disable-underscore, --disable-interwork, --disable-biendian and --disable-nofmult have been obsoleted. On MIPS targets, the options --disable-single-float, --disable-biendian and --disable-softfloat have been obsoleted. * Support has been removed for all the [3]configurations obsoleted in GCC 4.5. General Optimizer Improvements * A new general optimization level, -Ofast, has been introduced. It combines the existing optimization level -O3 with options that can affect standards compliance but result in better optimized code. For example, -Ofast enables -ffast-math. * Link-time optimization improvements: + The [4]Scalable Whole Program Optimizer (WHOPR) project has stabilized to the point of being usable. It has become the default mode when using the LTO optimization model. Link time optimization can now split itself into multiple parallel compilations. Parallelism is controlled with -flto=n (where n specifies the number of compilations to execute in parallel). GCC can also cooperate with a GNU make job server by specifying the -flto=jobserver option and adding + to the beginning of the Makefile rule executing the linker. Classical LTO mode can be enforced by -flto-partition=none. This may result in small code quality improvements. + A large number of bugs were fixed. GCC itself, Mozilla Firefox and other large applications can be built with LTO enabled. + The linker plugin support improvements o Linker plugin is now enabled by default when the linker is detected to have plugin support. This is the case for GNU ld 2.21.51 or newer (on ELF and Cygwin targets) and the Gold linker on ELF targets. Plugin support of the Apple linker on Darwin is not compatible with GCC. The linker plugin can also be controlled by the -fuse-linker-plugin command line option. o Resolution information from the linker plugin is used to drive whole program assumptions. Use of the linker plugin results in more aggressive optimization on binaries and on shared libraries that use the hidden visibility attribute. Consequently the use of -fwhole-program is not necessary in addition to LTO. + Hidden symbols used from non-LTO objects now have to be explicitly annotated with externally_visible when the linker plugin is not used. + C++ inline functions and virtual tables are now privatized more aggressively, leading to better inter-procedural optimization and faster dynamic linking. + Memory usage and intermediate language streaming performance have been improved. + Static constructors and destructors from individual units are inlined into a single function. This can significantly improve startup times of large C++ applications where static constructors are very common. For example, static constructors are used when including the iostream header. + Support for the Ada language has been added. * Interprocedural optimization improvements + The interprocedural framework was re-tuned for link time optimization. Several scalability issues were resolved. + Improved auto-detection of const and pure functions. Newly, noreturn functions are auto-detected. The [5]-Wsuggest-attribute=[const|pure|noreturn] flag is available that informs users when adding attributes to headers might improve code generation. + A number of inlining heuristic improvements. In particular: o Partial inlining is now supported and enabled by default at -O2 and greater. The feature can be controlled via -fpartial-inlining. Partial inlining splits functions with short hot path to return. This allows more aggressive inlining of the hot path leading to better performance and often to code size reductions (because cold parts of functions are not duplicated). o Scalability for large compilation units was improved significantly. o Inlining of callbacks is now more aggressive. o Virtual methods are considered for inlining when the caller is inlined and devirtualization is then possible. o Inlining when optimizing for size (either in cold regions of a program or when compiling with -Os) was improved to better handle C++ programs with larger abstraction penalty, leading to smaller and faster code. + The IPA reference optimization pass detecting global variables used or modified by functions was strengthened and sped up. + Functions whose address was taken are now optimized out when all references to them are dead. + A new inter-procedural static profile estimation pass detects functions that are executed once or unlikely to be executed. Unlikely executed functions are optimized for size. Functions executed once are optimized for size except for the inner loops. + On most targets with named section support, functions used only at startup (static constructors and main), functions used only at exit and functions detected to be cold are placed into separate text segment subsections. This extends the -freorder-functions feature and is controlled by the same switch. The goal is to improve the startup time of large C++ programs. Proper function placement requires linker support. GNU ld 2.21.51 on ELF targets was updated to place those functions together within the text section leading to better code locality and faster startup times of large C++ programs. The feature is also supported in the Apple linker. Support in the gold linker is planned. * A new switch -fstack-usage has been added. It makes the compiler output stack usage information for the program, on a per-function basis, in an auxiliary file. * A new switch -fcombine-stack-adjustments has been added. It can be used to enable or disable the compiler's stack-slot combining pass which before was enabled automatically at -O1 and above, but could not be controlled on its own. * A new switch -fstrict-volatile-bitfields has been added. Using it indicates that accesses to volatile bitfields should use a single access of the width of the field's type. This option can be useful for precisely defining and accessing memory-mapped peripheral registers from C or C++. Compile time and memory usage improvements * Datastructures used by the dataflow framework in GCC were reorganized for better memory usage and more cache locality. Compile time is improved especially on units with large functions (possibly resulting from a lot of inlining) not fitting into the processor cache. The compile time of the GCC C compiler binary with link-time optimization went down by over 10% (benchmarked on x86-64 target). New Languages and Language specific improvements Ada * Stack checking has been improved on selected architectures (Alpha, IA-32/x86-64, RS/6000 and SPARC): it now will detect stack overflows in all cases on these architectures. * Initial support for Ada 2012 has been added. C family * A new warning, enabled by -Wdouble-promotion, has been added that warns about cases where a value of type float is implicitly promoted to double. This is especially helpful for CPUs that handle the former in hardware, but emulate the latter in software. * A new function attribute leaf was introduced. This attribute allows better inter-procedural optimization across calls to functions that return to the current unit only via returning or exception handling. This is the case for most library functions that have no callbacks. * Support for a new data type __int128 for targets having wide enough machine-mode support. * The new function attribute callee_pop_aggregate allows to specify if the caller or callee is responsible for popping the aggregate return pointer value from the stack. * Support for selectively enabling and disabling warnings via #pragma GCC diagnostic has been added. For instance: #pragma GCC diagnostic error "-Wuninitialized" foo(a); /* error is given for this one */ #pragma GCC diagnostic push #pragma GCC diagnostic ignored "-Wuninitialized" foo(b); /* no diagnostic for this one */ #pragma GCC diagnostic pop foo(c); /* error is given for this one */ #pragma GCC diagnostic pop foo(d); /* depends on command line options */ * The -fmax-errors=N option is now supported. Using this option causes the compiler to exit after N errors have been issued. C * There is now experimental support for some features from the upcoming C1X revision of the ISO C standard. This support may be selected with -std=c1x, or -std=gnu1x for C1X with GNU extensions. Note that this support is experimental and may change incompatibly in future releases for consistency with changes to the C1X standard draft. The following features are newly supported as described in the N1539 draft of C1X (with changes agreed at the March 2011 WG14 meeting); some other features were already supported with no compiler changes being needed, or have some support but not in full accord with N1539 (as amended). + Static assertions (_Static_assert keyword) + Typedef redefinition + New macros in + Anonymous structures and unions * The new -fplan9-extensions option directs the compiler to support some extensions for anonymous struct fields which are implemented by the Plan 9 compiler. A pointer to a struct may be automatically converted to a pointer to an anonymous field when calling a function, in order to make the types match. An anonymous struct field whose type is a typedef name may be referred to using the typedef name. C++ * Improved [6]experimental support for the upcoming C++0x ISO C++ standard, including support for constexpr (thanks to Gabriel Dos Reis and Jason Merrill), nullptr (thanks to Magnus Fromreide), noexcept, unrestricted unions, range-based for loops (thanks to Rodrigo Rivas Costa), opaque enum declarations (thanks also to Rodrigo), implicitly deleted functions and implicit move constructors. * When an extern declaration within a function does not match a declaration in the enclosing context, G++ now properly declares the name within the namespace of the function rather than the namespace which was open just before the function definition ([7]c++/43145). * GCC now warns by default when casting integers to larger pointer types. These warnings can be disabled with the option -Wno-int-to-pointer-cast, which is now also available in C++. * G++ no longer optimizes using the assumption that a value of enumeration type will fall within the range specified by the standard, since that assumption is easily violated with a conversion from integer type ([8]c++/43680). The old behavior can be restored with -fstrict-enums. * The new -fnothrow-opt flag changes the semantics of a throw() exception specification to match the proposed semantics of the noexcept specification: just call terminate if an exception tries to propagate out of a function with such an exception specification. This dramatically reduces or eliminates the code size overhead from adding the exception specification. * The new -Wnoexcept flag will suggest adding a noexcept qualifier to a function that the compiler can tell doesn't throw if it would change the value of a noexcept expression. * The -Wshadow option now warns if a local variable or type declaration shadows another type in C++. Note that the compiler will not warn if a local variable shadows a struct/class/enum, but will warn if it shadows an explicit typedef. * When an identifier is not found in the current scope, G++ now offers suggestions about which identifier might have been intended. * G++ now issues clearer diagnostics for missing semicolons after class, struct, and union definitions. * G++ now issues clearer diagnostics for missing semicolons after class member declarations. * G++ now issues clearer diagnostics when a colon is used in a place where a double-colon was intended. * G++ no longer accepts mutable on reference members ([9]c++/33558). Use -fpermissive to allow the old, non-conforming behaviour. * A few mangling fixes have been made, to attribute const/volatile on function pointer types, decltype of a plain decl, and use of a function parameter in the declaration of another parameter. By default the compiler still uses the old mangling, but emits aliases with the new mangling on targets that support strong aliases. Users can switch over entirely to the new mangling with -fabi-version=5 or -fabi-version=0. -Wabi will now warn about code that uses the old mangling. * In 4.6.0 and 4.6.1 G++ no longer allows objects of const-qualified type to be default initialized unless the type has a user-declared default constructor. In 4.6.2 G++ implements the proposed resolution of [10]DR 253, so default initialization is allowed if it initializes all subobjects. Code that fails to compile can be fixed by providing an initializer e.g. struct A { A(); }; struct B : A { int i; }; const B b = B(); Use -fpermissive to allow the old, non-conforming behaviour. Runtime Library (libstdc++) * [11]Improved experimental support for the upcoming ISO C++ standard, C++0x, including using constexpr and nullptr. * Performance improvements to the [12]Debug Mode, thanks to Franc,ois Dumont. * Atomic operations used for reference-counting are annotated so that they can be understood by race detectors such as Helgrind, see [13]Data Race Hunting. * Most libstdc++ standard headers have been changed to no longer include the cstddef header as an implementation detail. Code that relied on that header being included as side-effect of including other standard headers will need to include cstddef explicitly. Fortran * On systems supporting the libquadmath library, GNU Fortran now also supports a quad-precision, kind=16 floating-point data type (REAL(16), COMPLEX(16)). As the data type is not fully supported in hardware, calculations might be one to two orders of magnitude slower than with the 4, 8 or 10 bytes floating-point data types. This change does not affect systems which support REAL(16) in hardware nor those which do not support libquadmath. * Much improved compile time for large array constructors. * In order to reduce execution time and memory consumption, use of temporary arrays in assignment expressions is avoided for many cases. The compiler now reverses loops in order to avoid generating a temporary array where possible. * Improved diagnostics, especially with -fwhole-file. * The -fwhole-file flag is now enabled by default. This improves code generation and diagnostics. It can be disabled using the deprecated -fno-whole-file flag. * Support the generation of Makefile dependencies via the [14]-M... flags of GCC; you may need to specify the -cpp option in addition. The dependencies take modules, Fortran's include, and CPP's #include into account. Note: Using -M for the module path is no longer supported, use -J instead. * The flag -Wconversion has been modified to only issue warnings where a conversion leads to information loss. This drastically reduces the number of warnings; -Wconversion is thus now enabled with -Wall. The flag -Wconversion-extra has been added and also warns about other conversions; -Wconversion-extra typically issues a huge number of warnings, most of which can be ignored. * A new command-line option -Wunused-dummy-argument warns about unused dummy arguments and is included in -Wall. Before, -Wunused-variable also warned about unused dummy arguments. * Fortran 2003 support has been extended: + Improved support for polymorphism between libraries and programs and for complicated inheritance patterns (cf. [15]object-oriented programming). + Experimental support of the ASSOCIATE construct. + In pointer assignments it is now possible to specify the lower bounds of the pointer and, for a rank-1 or a simply contiguous data-target, to remap the bounds. + Automatic (re)allocation: In intrinsic assignments to allocatable variables the left-hand side will be automatically allocated (if unallocated) or reallocated (if the shape or type parameter is different). To avoid the small performance penalty, you can use a(:) = ... instead of a = ... for arrays and character strings - or disable the feature using -std=f95 or -fno-realloc-lhs. + Deferred type parameter: For scalar allocatable and pointer variables the character length can be deferred. + Namelist variables with allocatable and pointer attribute and nonconstant length type parameter are supported. * Fortran 2008 support has been extended: + Experimental [16]coarray support (for one image only, i.e. num_images() == 1); use the [17]-fcoarray=single flag to enable it. + The STOP and the new ERROR STOP statements now support all constant expressions. + Support for the CONTIGUOUS attribute. + Support for ALLOCATE with MOLD. + Support for the STORAGE_SIZE intrinsic inquiry function. + Support of the NORM2 and PARITY intrinsic functions. + The following bit intrinsics were added: POPCNT and POPPAR for counting the number of 1 bits and returning the parity; BGE, BGT, BLE, and BLT for bitwise comparisons; DSHIFTL and DSHIFTR for combined left and right shifts, MASKL and MASKR for simple left and right justified masks, MERGE_BITS for a bitwise merge using a mask, SHIFTA, SHIFTL and SHIFTR for shift operations, and the transformational bit intrinsics IALL, IANY and IPARITY. + Support of the EXECUTE_COMMAND_LINE intrinsic subroutine. + Support for the IMPURE attribute for procedures, which allows for ELEMENTAL procedures without the restrictions of PURE. + Null pointers (including NULL()) and not allocated variables can be used as actual argument to optional non-pointer, non-allocatable dummy arguments, denoting an absent argument. + Non-pointer variables with TARGET attribute can be used as actual argument to POINTER dummies with INTENT(IN) + Pointers including procedure pointers and those in a derived type (pointer components) can now be initialized by a target instead of only by NULL. + The EXIT statement (with construct-name) can now be used to leave not only the DO but also the ASSOCIATE, BLOCK, IF, SELECT CASE and SELECT TYPE constructs. + Internal procedures can now be used as actual argument. + The named constants INTEGER_KINDS, LOGICAL_KINDS, REAL_KINDS and CHARACTER_KINDS of the intrinsic module ISO_FORTRAN_ENV have been added; these arrays contain the supported kind values for the respective types. + The module procedures C_SIZEOF of the intrinsic module ISO_C_BINDINGS and COMPILER_VERSION and COMPILER_OPTIONS of ISO_FORTRAN_ENV have been implemented. + Minor changes: obsolescence diagnostics for ENTRY was added for -std=f2008; a line may start with a semicolon; for internal and module procedures END can be used instead of END SUBROUTINE and END FUNCTION; SELECTED_REAL_KIND now also takes a RADIX argument; intrinsic types are supported for TYPE(intrinsic-type-spec); multiple type-bound procedures can be declared in a single PROCEDURE statement; implied-shape arrays are supported for named constants (PARAMETER). The transformational, three argument versions of BESSEL_JN and BESSEL_YN were added - the elemental, two-argument version had been added in GCC 4.4; note that the transformational functions use a recurrence algorithm. Go Support for the [18]Go programming language has been added to GCC. It is not enabled by default when you build GCC; use the --enable-languages configure option to build it. The driver program for compiling Go code is gccgo. Go is currently known to work on GNU/Linux and RTEMS. Solaris support is in progress. It may or may not work on other platforms. Java (GCJ) Objective-C and Objective-C++ * The -fobjc-exceptions flag is now required to enable Objective-C exception and synchronization syntax (introduced by the keywords @try, @catch, @finally and @synchronized). * A number of Objective-C 2.0 features and extensions are now supported by GCC. These features are enabled by default; you can disable them by using the new -fobjc-std=objc1 command-line option. * The Objective-C 2.0 dot-syntax is now supported. It is an alternative syntax for using getters and setters; object.count is automatically converted into [object count] or [object setCount: ...] depending on context; for example if (object.count > 0) is automatically compiled into the equivalent of if ([object count] > 0) while object.count = 0; is automatically compiled into the equivalent ot [object setCount: 0];. The dot-syntax can be used with instance and class objects and with any setters or getters, no matter if they are part of a declared property or not. * Objective-C 2.0 declared properties are now supported. They are declared using the new @property keyword, and are most commonly used in conjunction with the new Objective-C 2.0 dot-syntax. The nonatomic, readonly, readwrite, assign, retain, copy, setter and getter attributes are all supported. Marking declared properties with __attribute__ ((deprecated)) is supported too. * The Objective-C 2.0 @synthesize and @dynamic keywords are supported. @synthesize causes the compiler to automatically synthesize a declared property, while @dynamic is used to disable all warnings for a declared property for which no implementation is provided at compile time. Synthesizing declared properties requires runtime support in most useful cases; to be able to use it with the GNU runtime, appropriate helper functions have been added to the GNU Objective-C runtime ABI, and are implemented by the GNU Objective-C runtime library shipped with GCC. * The Objective-C 2.0 fast enumeration syntax is supported in Objective-C. This is currently not yet available in Objective-C++. Fast enumeration requires support in the runtime, and such support has been added to the GNU Objective-C runtime library (shipped with GCC). * The Objective-C 2.0 @optional keyword is supported. It allows you to mark methods or properties in a protocol as optional as opposed to required. * The Objective-C 2.0 @package keyword is supported. It has currently the same effect as the @public keyword. * Objective-C 2.0 method attributes are supported. Currently the supported attributes are deprecated, sentinel, noreturn and format. * Objective-C 2.0 method argument attributes are supported. The most widely used attribute is unused, to mark an argument as unused in the implementation. * Objective-C 2.0 class and protocol attributes are supported. Currently the only supported attribute is deprecated. * Objective-C 2.0 class extensions are supported. A class extension has the same syntax as a category declaration with no category name, and the methods and properties declared in it are added directly to the main class. It is mostly used as an alternative to a category to add methods to a class without advertising them in the public headers, with the advantage that for class extensions the compiler checks that all the privately declared methods are actually implemented. * As a result of these enhancements, GCC can now be used to build Objective-C and Objective-C++ software that uses Foundation and other important system frameworks with the NeXT runtime on Darwin 9 and Darwin 10 (Mac OS X 10.5 and 10.6). Currently this is for m32 code only. * Many bugs in the compiler have been fixed in this release; in particular, LTO can now be used when compiling Objective-C and Objective-C++ and the parser is much more robust in dealing with invalid code. Runtime Library (libobjc) * The GNU Objective-C runtime library now defines the macro __GNU_LIBOBJC__ (with a value that is increased at every release where there is any change to the API) in objc/objc.h, making it easy to determine if the GNU Objective-C runtime library is being used, and if so, which version. Previous versions of the GNU Objective-C runtime library (and other Objective-C runtime libraries such as the Apple one) do not define this macro. * A new Objective-C 2.0 API, almost identical to the one implemented by the Apple Objective-C runtime, has been implemented in the GNU Objective-C runtime library. The new API hides the internals of most runtime structures but provides a more extensive set of functions to operate on them. It is much easier, for example, to create or modify classes at runtime. The new API also makes it easier to port software from Apple to GNU as almost no changes should be required. The old API is still supported for backwards compatibility; including the old objc/objc-api.h header file automatically selects the old API, while including the new objc/runtime.h header file automatically selects the new API. Support for the old API is being phased out and upgrading the software to use the new API is strongly recommended. To check for the availability of the new API, the __GNU_LIBOBJC__ macro can be used as older versions of the GNU Objective-C runtime library, which do not support the new API, do not define such a macro. * Runtime support for @synchronized has been added. * Runtime support for Objective-C 2.0 synthesized property accessors has been added. * Runtime support for Objective-C 2.0 fast enumeration has been added. New Targets and Target Specific Improvements ARM * GCC now supports the Cortex-M4 processor implementing the v7-em version of the architecture using the option -mcpu=cortex-m4. * Scheduling descriptions for the Cortex-M4, the Neon and the floating point units of the Cortex-A9 and a pipeline description for the Cortex-A5 have been added. * Synchronization primitives such as __sync_fetch_and_add and friends are now inlined for supported architectures rather than calling into a kernel helper function. * SSA loop prefetching is enabled by default for the Cortex-A9 at -O3. * Several improvements were committed to improve code generation for the ARM architecture including a rewritten implementation for load and store multiples. * Several enhancements were committed to improve SIMD code generation for NEON by adding support for widening instructions, misaligned loads and stores, vector conditionals and support for 64 bit arithmetic. * Support was added for the Faraday cores fa526, fa606te, fa626te, fmp626te, fmp626 and fa726te and can be used with the respective names as parameters to the -mcpu= option. * Basic support was added for Cortex-A15 and is available through -mcpu=cortex-a15. * GCC for AAPCS configurations now more closely adheres to the AAPCS specification by enabling -fstrict-volatile-bitfields by default. IA-32/x86-64 * The new -fsplit-stack option permits programs to use a discontiguous stack. This is useful for threaded programs, in that it is no longer necessary to specify the maximum stack size when creating a thread. This feature is currently only implemented for 32-bit and 64-bit x86 GNU/Linux targets. * Support for emitting profiler counter calls before function prologues. This is enabled via a new command-line option -mfentry. * Optimization for the Intel Core 2 processors is now available through the -march=core2 and -mtune=core2 options. * Support for Intel Core i3/i5/i7 processors is now available through the -march=corei7 and -mtune=corei7 options. * Support for Intel Core i3/i5/i7 processors with AVX is now available through the -march=corei7-avx and -mtune=corei7-avx options. * Support for AMD Bobcat (family 14) processors is now available through the -march=btver1 and -mtune=btver1 options. * The default setting (when not optimizing for size) for 32-bit GNU/Linux and Darwin x86 targets has been changed to -fomit-frame-pointer. The default can be reverted to -fno-omit-frame-pointer by configuring GCC with the --enable-frame-pointer configure option. * Darwin, FreeBSD, Solaris 2, MinGW and Cygwin now all support __float128 on 32-bit and 64-bit x86 targets. * AVX floating-point arithmetic can now be enabled by default at configure time with the new --with-fpmath=avx option. * The SSA loop prefetching pass is enabled when using -O3 when optimizing for CPUs where prefetching is beneficial (AMD CPUs newer than K6). * Support for TBM (Trailing Bit Manipulation) built-in functions and code generation is available via -mtbm. * Support for AMD's BMI (Bit Manipulation) built-in functions and code generation is available via -mbmi. MicroBlaze * Support has been added for the Xilinx MicroBlaze softcore processor (microblaze-elf) embedded target. This configurable processor is supported on several Xilinx Spartan and Virtex FPGAs. MIPS * GCC now supports the Loongson 3A processor. Its canonical -march= and -mtune= name is loongson3a. MN10300 / AM33 * The inline assembly register constraint "A" has been renamed "c". This constraint is used to select a floating-point register that can be used as the destination of a multiply-accumulate instruction. * New inline assembly register constraints "A" and "D" have been added. These constraint letters resolve to all general registers when compiling for AM33, and resolve to address registers only or data registers only when compiling for MN10300. * The MDR register is represented in the compiler. One can access the register via the "z" constraint in inline assembly. It can be marked as clobbered or used as a local register variable via the "mdr" name. The compiler uses the RETF instruction if the function does not modify the MDR register, so it is important that inline assembly properly annotate any usage of the register. PowerPC/PowerPC64 * GCC now supports the Applied Micro Titan processor with -mcpu=titan. * The -mrecip option has been added, which indicates whether the reciprocal and reciprocal square root instructions should be used. * The -mveclibabi=mass option can be used to enable the compiler to autovectorize mathematical functions using the Mathematical Acceleration Subsystem library. * The -msingle-pic-base option has been added, which instructs the compiler to avoid loading the PIC base register in function prologues. The PIC base register must be initialized by the runtime system. * The -mblock-move-inline-limit option has been added, which enables the user to control the maximum size of inlined memcpy calls and similar. * PowerPC64 GNU/Linux support for applications requiring a large TOC section has been improved. A new command-line option, -mcmodel=MODEL, controls this feature; valid values for MODEL are small, medium, or large. * The altivec builtin functions vec_ld and vec_st have been modified to generate the Altivec memory instructions LVX and STVX, even if the -mvsx option is used. In the initial GCC 4.5 release, these builtin functions were changed to generate VSX memory reference instructions instead of Altivec memory instructions, but there are differences between the two instructions. If the VSX instruction set is available, you can now use the new builtin functions vec_vsx_ld and vec_vsx_st which always generates the VSX memory instructions. * The GCC compiler on AIX now defaults to a process layout with a larger data space allowing larger programs to be compiled. * The GCC long double type on AIX 6.1 and above has reverted to 64 bit double precision, matching the AIX XL compiler default, because of missing C99 symbols required by the GCC runtime. * The default processor scheduling model and tuning for PowerPC64 GNU/Linux and for AIX 6.1 and above now is POWER7. * Starting with GCC 4.6.1, vectors of type vector long long or vector long are passed and returned in the same method as other vectors with the VSX instruction set. Previously the GCC compiler did not adhere to the ABI for 128-bit vectors with 64-bit integer base types (PR 48857). This is also fixed in the GCC 4.5.4 release. S/390, zSeries and System z9/z10, IBM zEnterprise z196 * Support for the zEnterprise z196 processor has been added. When using the -march=z196 option, the compiler will generate code making use of the following instruction facilities: + Conditional load/store + Distinct-operands + Floating-point-extension + Interlocked-access + Population-count The -mtune=z196 option avoids the compare and branch instructions as well as the load address instruction with an index register as much as possible and performs instruction scheduling appropriate for the new out-of-order pipeline architecture. * When using the -m31 -mzarch options the generated code still conforms to the 32-bit ABI but uses the general purpose registers as 64-bit registers internally. This requires a Linux kernel saving the whole 64-bit registers when doing a context switch. Kernels providing that feature indicate that by the 'highgprs' string in /proc/cpuinfo. * The SSA loop prefetching pass is enabled when using -O3. SPARC * GCC now supports the LEON series of SPARC V8 processors. The code generated by the compiler can either be tuned to it by means of the --with-tune=leon configure option and -mtune=leon compilation option, or the compiler can be built for the sparc-leon-{elf,linux} and sparc-leon3-{elf,linux} targets directly. * GCC has stopped sign/zero-extending parameter registers in the callee for functions taking parameters with sub-word size in 32-bit mode, since this is redundant with the specification of the ABI. GCC has never done so in 64-bit mode since this is also redundant. Operating Systems Android * GCC now supports the Bionic C library and provides a convenient way of building native libraries and applications for the Android platform. Refer to the documentation of the -mandroid and -mbionic options for details on building native code. At the moment, Android support is enabled only for ARM. Darwin/Mac OS X * General + Initial support for CFString types has been added. This allows GCC to build projects including the system Core Foundation frameworks. The GCC Objective-C family supports CFString "toll-free bridged" as per the Mac OS X system tools. CFString is also recognized in the context of format attributes and arguments (see the documentation for format attributes for limitations). At present, 8-bit character types are supported. + Object file size reduction. The Darwin zeroed memory allocators have been re-written to make more use of .zerofill sections. For non-debug code, this can reduce object file size significantly. * x86 Architecture + The -mdynamic-no-pic option has been enabled. Code supporting -mdynamic-no-pic optimization has been added and is applicable to -m32 builds. The compiler bootstrap uses the option where appropriate. + The default value for -mtune= has been changed. Since Darwin systems are primarily Xeon, Core-2 or similar the default tuning has been changed to -mtune=core2. + Enable 128-bit long double (__float128) support on Darwin. * PPC Architecture + Darwin64 ABI. Several significant bugs have been fixed, such that GCC now produces code compatible with the Darwin64 PowerPC ABI. + libffi and boehm-gc. The Darwin ports of the libffi and boehm-gc libraries have been upgraded to include a Darwin64 implementation. This means that powerpc*-*-darwin9 platforms may now, for example, build Java applications with -m64 enabled. + Plug-in support has been enabled. + The -fsection-anchors option is now available although, presently, not heavily tested. Solaris 2 New Features * Support symbol versioning with the Sun linker. * Allow libstdc++ to leverage full ISO C99 support on Solaris 10+. * Support thread-local storage (TLS) with the Sun assembler on Solaris 2/x86. * Support TLS on Solaris 8/9 if prerequisites are met. * Support COMDAT group with the GNU assembler and recent Sun linker. * Support the Sun assembler visibility syntax. * Default Solaris 2/x86 to -march=pentium4 (Solaris 10+) resp. -march=pentiumpro (Solaris 8/9). * Don't use SSE on Solaris 8/9 x86 by default. * Enable 128-bit long double (__float128) support on Solaris 2/x86. ABI Change * Change the ABI for returning 8-byte vectors like __m64 in MMX registers on Solaris 10+/x86 to match the Sun Studio 12.1+ compilers. This is an incompatible change. If you use such types, you must either recompile all your code with the new compiler or use the new -mvect8-ret-in-mem option to remain compatible with previous versions of GCC and Sun Studio. Windows x86/x86_64 * Initial support for decimal floating point. * Support for the __thiscall calling-convention. * Support for hot-patchable function prologues via the ms_hook_prologue attribute for x86_64 in addition to 32-bit x86. * Improvements of stack-probing and stack-allocation mechanisms. * Support of push/pop-macro pragma as preprocessor command. With #pragma push_macro("macro-name") the current definition of macro-name is saved and can be restored with #pragma pop_macro("macro-name") to its saved definition. * Enable 128-bit long double (__float128) support on MinGW and Cygwin. Documentation improvements Other significant improvements Installation changes * An install-strip make target is provided that installs stripped executables, and may install libraries with unneeded or debugging sections stripped. * On Power7 systems, there is a potential problem if you build the GCC compiler with a host compiler using options that enables the VSX instruction set generation. If the host compiler has been patched so that the vec_ld and vec_st builtin functions generate Altivec memory instructions instead of VSX memory instructions, then you should be able to build the compiler with VSX instruction generation. Changes for GCC Developers Note: these changes concern developers that develop GCC itself or software that integrates with GCC, such as plugins, and not the general GCC users. * The gengtype utility, which previously was internal to the GCC build process, has been enchanced to provide GC root information for plugins as necessary. * The old GC allocation interface of ggc_alloc and friends was replaced with a type-safe alternative. GCC 4.6.1 This is the [19]list of problem reports (PRs) from GCC's bug tracking system that are known to be fixed in the 4.6.1 release. This list might not be complete (that is, it is possible that some PRs that have been fixed are not listed here). GCC 4.6.2 This is the [20]list of problem reports (PRs) from GCC's bug tracking system that are known to be fixed in the 4.6.2 release. This list might not be complete (that is, it is possible that some PRs that have been fixed are not listed here). SPARC * The command line option -mfix-at697f has been added to enable the documented workaround for the single erratum of the Atmel AT697F processor. For questions related to the use of GCC, please consult these web pages and the [21]GCC manuals. If that fails, the [22]gcc-help@gcc.gnu.org mailing list might help. Comments on these web pages and the development of GCC are welcome on our developer list at [23]gcc@gcc.gnu.org. All of [24]our lists have public archives. Copyright (C) [25]Free Software Foundation, Inc. Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium, provided this notice is preserved. These pages are [26]maintained by the GCC team. Last modified 2011-10-13[27]. References 1. http://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=10401 2. http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.5/changes.html 3. http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.5/changes.html#obsoleted 4. http://gcc.gnu.org/projects/lto/whopr.pdf 5. http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Warning-Options.html#Warning-Options 6. http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.6/cxx0x_status.html 7. http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=43145 8. http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=43680 9. http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=33558 10. http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/cwg_active.html#253 11. http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/libstdc++/manual/status.html#status.iso.200x 12. http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/libstdc++/manual/debug_mode.html 13. http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/libstdc++/manual/debug.html#debug.races 14. http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Preprocessor-Options.html 15. http://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/OOP 16. http://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/Coarray 17. http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gfortran/Code-Gen-Options.html#index-g_t_0040code_007bfcoarray_007d-233 18. http://golang.org/ 19. http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/buglist.cgi?bug_status=RESOLVED&resolution=FIXED&target_milestone=4.6.1 20. http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/buglist.cgi?bug_status=RESOLVED&resolution=FIXED&target_milestone=4.6.2 21. http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/ 22. mailto:gcc-help@gcc.gnu.org 23. mailto:gcc@gcc.gnu.org 24. http://gcc.gnu.org/lists.html 25. http://www.fsf.org/ 26. http://gcc.gnu.org/about.html 27. http://validator.w3.org/check/referer ====================================================================== http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.5/index.html GCC 4.5 Release Series Apr 28, 2011 The [1]GNU project and the GCC developers are pleased to announce the release of GCC 4.5.3. This release is a bug-fix release, containing fixes for regressions in GCC 4.5.2 relative to previous releases of GCC. Release History GCC 4.5.3 Apr 28, 2011 ([2]changes) GCC 4.5.2 Dec 16, 2010 ([3]changes) GCC 4.5.1 Jul 31, 2010 ([4]changes) GCC 4.5.0 April 14, 2010 ([5]changes) References and Acknowledgements GCC used to stand for the GNU C Compiler, but since the compiler supports several other languages aside from C, it now stands for the GNU Compiler Collection. A list of [6]successful builds is updated as new information becomes available. The GCC developers would like to thank the numerous people that have contributed new features, improvements, bug fixes, and other changes as well as test results to GCC. This [7]amazing group of volunteers is what makes GCC successful. For additional information about GCC please refer to the [8]GCC project web site or contact the [9]GCC development mailing list. To obtain GCC please use [10]our mirror sites or [11]our SVN server. For questions related to the use of GCC, please consult these web pages and the [12]GCC manuals. If that fails, the [13]gcc-help@gcc.gnu.org mailing list might help. Comments on these web pages and the development of GCC are welcome on our developer list at [14]gcc@gcc.gnu.org. All of [15]our lists have public archives. Copyright (C) [16]Free Software Foundation, Inc. Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium, provided this notice is preserved. These pages are [17]maintained by the GCC team. Last modified 2011-04-28[18]. References 1. http://www.gnu.org/ 2. http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.5/changes.html 3. http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.5/changes.html 4. http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.5/changes.html 5. http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.5/changes.html 6. http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.5/buildstat.html 7. http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Contributors.html 8. http://gcc.gnu.org/index.html 9. mailto:gcc@gcc.gnu.org 10. http://gcc.gnu.org/mirrors.html 11. http://gcc.gnu.org/svn.html 12. http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/ 13. mailto:gcc-help@gcc.gnu.org 14. mailto:gcc@gcc.gnu.org 15. http://gcc.gnu.org/lists.html 16. http://www.fsf.org/ 17. http://gcc.gnu.org/about.html 18. http://validator.w3.org/check/referer ====================================================================== http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.5/changes.html GCC 4.5 Release Series Changes, New Features, and Fixes Caveats * GCC now requires the [1]MPC library in order to build. See the [2]prerequisites page for version requirements. * Support for a number of older systems and recently unmaintained or untested target ports of GCC has been declared obsolete in GCC 4.5. Unless there is activity to revive them, the next release of GCC will have their sources permanently removed. The following ports for individual systems on particular architectures have been obsoleted: + IRIX releases before 6.5 (mips-sgi-irix5*, mips-sgi-irix6.[0-4]) + Solaris 7 (*-*-solaris2.7) + Tru64 UNIX releases before V5.1 (alpha*-dec-osf4*, alpha-dec-osf5.0*) + Details for the IRIX, Solaris 7, and Tru64 UNIX obsoletions can be found in the [3]announcement. Support for the classic POWER architecture implemented in the original RIOS and RIOS2 processors of the old IBM RS/6000 product line has been obsoleted in the rs6000 port. This does not affect the new generation Power and PowerPC architectures. * Support has been removed for all the [4]configurations obsoleted in GCC 4.4. * Support has been removed for the protoize and unprotoize utilities, obsoleted in GCC 4.4. * Support has been removed for tuning for Itanium1 (Merced) variants. Note that code tuned for Itanium2 should also run correctly on Itanium1. * GCC now generates unwind info also for epilogues. DWARF debuginfo generated by GCC now uses more features of DWARF3 than before, and also some DWARF4 features. GDB older than 7.0 is not able to handle either of these, so to debug GCC 4.5 generated binaries or libraries GDB 7.0 or later is needed. You can disable use of DWARF4 features with the -gdwarf-3 -gstrict-dwarf options, or use -gdwarf-2 -gstrict-dwarf to restrict GCC to just DWARF2, but epilogue unwind info is emitted unconditionally whenever unwind info is emitted. * On x86 targets, code containing floating-point calculations may run significantly slower when compiled with GCC 4.5 in strict C99 conformance mode than they did with earlier GCC versions. This is due to stricter standard conformance of the compiler and can be avoided by using the option -fexcess-precision=fast; also see [5]below. * The function attribute noinline no longer prevents GCC from cloning the function. A new attribute noclone has been introduced for this purpose. Cloning a function means that it is duplicated and the new copy is specialized for certain contexts (for example when a parameter is a known constant). General Optimizer Improvements * The -save-temps now takes an optional argument. The -save-temps and -save-temps=cwd switches write the temporary files in the current working directory based on the original source file. The -save-temps=obj switch will write files into the directory specified with the -o option, and the intermediate filenames are based on the output file. This will allow the user to get the compiler intermediate files when doing parallel builds without two builds of the same filename located in different directories from interfering with each other. * Debugging dumps are now created in the same directory as the object file rather than in the current working directory. This allows the user to get debugging dumps when doing parallel builds without two builds of the same filename interfering with each other. * GCC has been integrated with the [6]MPC library. This allows GCC to evaluate complex arithmetic at compile time [7]more accurately. It also allows GCC to evaluate calls to complex built-in math functions having constant arguments and replace them at compile time with their mathematically equivalent results. In doing so, GCC can generate correct results regardless of the math library implementation or floating point precision of the host platform. This also allows GCC to generate identical results regardless of whether one compiles in native or cross-compile configurations to a particular target. The following built-in functions take advantage of this new capability: cacos, cacosh, casin, casinh, catan, catanh, ccos, ccosh, cexp, clog, cpow, csin, csinh, csqrt, ctan, and ctanh. The float and long double variants of these functions (e.g. csinf and csinl) are also handled. * A new link-time optimizer has been added ([8]-flto). When this option is used, GCC generates a bytecode representation of each input file and writes it to special ELF sections in each object file. When the object files are linked together, all the function bodies are read from these ELF sections and instantiated as if they had been part of the same translation unit. This enables interprocedural optimizations to work across different files (and even different languages), potentially improving the performance of the generated code. To use the link-timer optimizer, -flto needs to be specified at compile time and during the final link. If the program does not require any symbols to be exported, it is possible to combine -flto and the experimental [9]-fwhopr with [10]-fwhole-program to allow the interprocedural optimizers to use more aggressive assumptions. * The automatic parallelization pass was enhanced to support parallelization of outer loops. * Automatic parallelization can be enabled as part of Graphite. In addition to -ftree-parallelize-loops=, specify -floop-parallelize-all to enable the Graphite-based optimization. * The infrastructure for optimizing based on [11]restrict qualified pointers has been rewritten and should result in code generation improvements. Optimizations based on restrict qualified pointers are now also available when using -fno-strict-aliasing. * There is a new optimization pass that attempts to change prototype of functions to avoid unused parameters, pass only relevant parts of structures and turn arguments passed by reference to arguments passed by value when possible. It is enabled by -O2 and above as well as -Os and can be manually invoked using the new command-line switch -fipa-sra. * GCC now optimize exception handling code. In particular cleanup regions that are proved to not have any effect are optimized out. New Languages and Language specific improvements All languages * The -fshow-column option is now on by default. This means error messages now have a column associated with them. Ada * Compilation of programs heavily using discriminated record types with variant parts has been sped up and generates more compact code. * Stack checking now works reasonably well on most plaforms. In some specific cases, stack overflows may still fail to be detected, but a compile-time warning will be issued for these cases. C family * If a header named in a #include directive is not found, the compiler exits immediately. This avoids a cascade of errors arising from declarations expected to be found in that header being missing. * A new built-in function __builtin_unreachable() has been added that tells the compiler that control will never reach that point. It may be used after asm statements that terminate by transferring control elsewhere, and in other places that are known to be unreachable. * The -Wlogical-op option now warns for logical expressions such as (c == 1 && c == 2) and (c != 1 || c != 2), which are likely to be mistakes. This option is disabled by default. * An asm goto feature has been added to allow asm statements that jump to C labels. * C++0x raw strings are supported for C++ and for C with -std=gnu99. * The deprecated attribute now takes an optional string argument, for example, __attribute__((deprecated("text string"))), that will be printed together with the deprecation warning. C * The -Wenum-compare option, which warns when comparing values of different enum types, now works for C. It formerly only worked for C++. This warning is enabled by -Wall. It may be avoided by using a type cast. * The -Wcast-qual option now warns about casts which are unsafe in that they permit const-correctness to be violated without further warnings. Specifically, it warns about cases where a qualifier is added when all the lower types are not const. For example, it warns about a cast from char ** to const char **. * The -Wc++-compat option is significantly improved. It issues new warnings for: + Using C++ reserved operator names as identifiers. + Conversions to enum types without explicit casts. + Using va_arg with an enum type. + Using different enum types in the two branches of ?:. + Using ++ or -- on a variable of enum type. + Using the same name as both a struct, union or enum tag and a typedef, unless the typedef refers to the tagged type itself. + Using a struct, union, or enum which is defined within another struct or union. + A struct field defined using a typedef if there is a field in the struct, or an enclosing struct, whose name is the typedef name. + Duplicate definitions at file scope. + Uninitialized const variables. + A global variable with an anonymous struct, union, or enum type. + Using a string constant to initialize a char array whose size is the length of the string. * The new -Wjump-misses-init option warns about cases where a goto or switch skips the initialization of a variable. This sort of branch is an error in C++ but not in C. This warning is enabled by -Wc++-compat. * GCC now ensures that a C99-conforming is present on most targets, and uses information about the types in this header to implement the Fortran bindings to those types. GCC does not ensure the presence of such a header, and does not implement the Fortran bindings, on the following targets: NetBSD, VxWorks, VMS, SymbianOS, WinCE, LynxOS, Netware, QNX, Interix, TPF. * GCC now implements C90- and C99-conforming rules for constant expressions. This may cause warnings or errors for some code using expressions that can be folded to a constant but are not constant expressions as defined by ISO C. * All known target-independent C90 and C90 Amendment 1 conformance bugs, and all known target-independent C99 conformance bugs not related to floating point or extended identifiers, have been fixed. * The C decimal floating point support now includes support for the FLOAT_CONST_DECIMAL64 pragma. * The named address space feature from ISO/IEC TR 18037 is now supported. This is currently only implemented for the SPU processor. C++ * Improved [12]experimental support for the upcoming C++0x ISO C++ standard, including support for raw strings, lambda expressions and explicit type conversion operators. * When printing the name of a class template specialization, G++ will now omit any template arguments which come from default template arguments. This behavior (and the pretty-printing of function template specializations as template signature and arguments) can be disabled with the -fno-pretty-templates option. * Access control is now applied to typedef names used in a template, which may cause G++ to reject some ill-formed code that was accepted by earlier releases. The -fno-access-control option can be used as a temporary workaround until the code is corrected. * Compilation time for code that uses templates should now scale linearly with the number of instantiations rather than quadratically, as template instantiations are now looked up using hash tables. * Declarations of functions that look like builtin declarations of library functions are only considered to be redeclarations if they are declared with extern "C". This may cause problems with code that omits extern "C" on hand-written declarations of C library functions such as abort or memcpy. Such code is ill-formed, but was accepted by earlier releases. * Diagnostics that used to complain about passing non-POD types to ... or jumping past the declaration of a non-POD variable now check for triviality rather than PODness, as per C++0x. * In C++0x mode local and anonymous classes are now allowed as template arguments, and in declarations of variables and functions with linkage, so long as any such declaration that is used is also defined ([13]DR 757). * Labels may now have attributes, as has been permitted for a while in C. This is only permitted when the label definition and the attribute specifier is followed by a semicolon--i.e., the label applies to an empty statement. The only useful attribute for a label is unused. * G++ now implements [14]DR 176. Previously G++ did not support using the injected-class-name of a template base class as a type name, and lookup of the name found the declaration of the template in the enclosing scope. Now lookup of the name finds the injected-class-name, which can be used either as a type or as a template, depending on whether or not the name is followed by a template argument list. As a result of this change, some code that was previously accepted may be ill-formed because 1. The injected-class-name is not accessible because it's from a private base, or 2. The injected-class-name cannot be used as an argument for a template template parameter. In either of these cases, the code can be fixed by adding a nested-name-specifier to explicitly name the template. The first can be worked around with -fno-access-control; the second is only rejected with -pedantic. * A new standard mangling for SIMD vector types has been added, to avoid name clashes on systems with vectors of varying length. By default the compiler still uses the old mangling, but emits aliases with the new mangling on targets that support strong aliases. Users can switch over entirely to the new mangling with -fabi-version=4 or -fabi-version=0. -Wabi will now warn about code that uses the old mangling. * The command-line option -ftemplate-depth-N is now written as -ftemplate-depth=N and the old form is deprecated. * Conversions between NULL and non-pointer types are now warned by default. The new option -Wno-conversion-null disables these warnings. Previously these warnings were only available when using -Wconversion explicitly. Runtime Library (libstdc++) * [15]Improved experimental support for the upcoming ISO C++ standard, C++0x, including: + Support for , , and . + Existing facilities now exploit explicit operators and the newly implemented core C++0x features. * An experimental [16]profile mode has been added. This is an implementation of many C++ standard library constructs with an additional analysis layer that gives performance improvement advice based on recognition of suboptimal usage patterns. For example, #include int main() { std::vector v; for (int k = 0; k < 1024; ++k) v.insert(v.begin(), k); } When instrumented via the profile mode, can return suggestions about the initial size and choice of the container used as follows: vector-to-list: improvement = 5: call stack = 0x804842c ... : advice = change std::vector to std::list vector-size: improvement = 3: call stack = 0x804842c ... : advice = change initial container size from 0 to 1024 These constructs can be substituted for the normal libstdc++ constructs on a piecemeal basis, or all existing components can be transformed via the -D_GLIBCXX_PROFILE macro. * [17]Support for decimal floating-point arithmetic (aka ISO C++ TR 24733) has been added. This support is in header file , uses namespace std::decimal, and includes classes decimal32, decimal64, and decimal128. * Sources have been audited for application of function attributes nothrow, const, pure, and noreturn. * Python pretty-printers have been added for many standard library components that simplify the internal representation and present a more intuitive view of components when used with appropriately-advanced versions of GDB. For more information, please consult the more [18]detailed description. * The default behavior for comparing typeinfo names has changed, so in , __GXX_MERGED_TYPEINFO_NAMES now defaults to zero. * The new -static-libstdc++ option directs g++ to link the C++ library statically, even if the default would normally be to link it dynamically. Fortran * The COMMON default padding has been changed - instead of adding the padding before a variable it is now added afterwards, which increases the compatibility with other vendors and helps to obtain the correct output in some cases. Cf. also the -falign-commons option ([19]added in 4.4). * The -finit-real= option now also supports the value snan for signalling not-a-number; to be effective, one additionally needs to enable trapping (e.g. via -ffpe-trap=). Note: Compile-time optimizations can turn a signalling NaN into a quiet one. * The new option -fcheck= has been added with the options bounds, array-temps, do, pointer, and recursive. The bounds and array-temps options are equivalent to -fbounds-check and -fcheck-array-temporaries. The do option checks for invalid modification of loop iteration variables, and the recursive option tests for recursive calls to subroutines/functions which are not marked as recursive. With pointer pointer association checks in calls are performed; however, neither undefined pointers nor pointers in expressions are handled. Using -fcheck=all enables all these run-time checks. * The run-time checking -fcheck=bounds now warns about invalid string lengths of character dummy arguments. Additionally, more compile-time checks have been added. * The new option [20]-fno-protect-parens has been added; if set, the compiler may reorder REAL and COMPLEX expressions without regard to parentheses. * GNU Fortran no longer links against libgfortranbegin. As before, MAIN__ (assembler symbol name) is the actual Fortran main program, which is invoked by the main function. However, main is now generated and put in the same object file as MAIN__. For the time being, libgfortranbegin still exists for backward compatibility. For details see the new [21]Mixed-Language Programming chapter in the manual. * The I/O library was restructured for performance and cleaner code. * Array assignments and WHERE are now run in parallel when OpenMP's WORKSHARE is used. * The experimental option -fwhole-file was added. The option allows whole-file checking of procedure arguments and allows for better optimizations. It can also be used with -fwhole-program, which is now also supported in gfortran. * More Fortran 2003 and Fortran 2008 mathematical functions can now be used as initialization expressions. * Some extended attributes such as STDCALL are now supported via the [22]GCC$ compiler directive. * For Fortran 77 compatibility: If -fno-sign-zero is used, the SIGN intrinsic behaves now as if zero were always positive. * For legacy compatibiliy: On Cygwin and MinGW, the special files CONOUT$ and CONIN$ (and CONERR$ which maps to CONOUT$) are now supported. * Fortran 2003 support has been extended: + Procedure-pointer function results and procedure-pointer components (including PASS), + allocatable scalars (experimental), + DEFERRED type-bound procedures, + the ERRMSG= argument of the ALLOCATE and DEALLOCATE statements have been implemented. + The ALLOCATE statement supports type-specs and the SOURCE= argument. + OPERATOR(*) and ASSIGNMENT(=) are now allowed as GENERIC type-bound procedure (i.e. as type-bound operators). + Rounding (ROUND=, RZ, ...) for output is now supported. + The INT_FAST{8,16,32,64,128}_T kind type parameters of the intrinsic module ISO_C_BINDING are now supported, except for the targets listed above as ones where GCC does not have type information. + Extensible derived types with type-bound procedure or procedure pointer with PASS attribute now have to use CLASS in line with the Fortran 2003 standard; the workaround to use TYPE is no longer supported. + [23]Experimental, incomplete support for polymorphism, including CLASS, SELECT TYPE and dynamic dispatch of type-bound procedure calls. Some features do not work yet such as unlimited polymorphism (CLASS(*)). * Fortran 2008 support has been extended: + The OPEN statement now supports the NEWUNIT= option, which returns a unique file unit, thus preventing inadvertent use of the same unit in different parts of the program. + Support for unlimited format items has been added. + The INT{8,16,32} and REAL{32,64,128} kind type parameters of the intrinsic module ISO_FORTRAN_ENV are now supported. + Using complex arguments with TAN, SINH, COSH, TANH, ASIN, ACOS, and ATAN is now possible; the functions ASINH, ACOSH, and ATANH have been added (for real and complex arguments) and ATAN(Y,X) is now an alias for ATAN2(Y,X). + The BLOCK construct has been implemented. Java (GCJ) New Targets and Target Specific Improvements AIX * Full cross-toolchain support now available with GNU Binutils ARM * GCC now supports the Cortex-M0 and Cortex-A5 processors. * GCC now supports the ARM v7E-M architecture. * GCC now supports VFPv4-based FPUs and FPUs with single-precision-only VFP. * GCC has many improvements to optimization for other ARM processors, including scheduling support for the integer pipeline on Cortex-A9. * GCC now supports the IEEE 754-2008 half-precision floating-point type, and a variant ARM-specific half-precision type. This type is specified using __fp16, with the layout determined by -mfp16-format. With appropriate -mfpu options, the Cortex-A9 and VFPv4 half-precision instructions will be used. * GCC now supports the variant of AAPCS that uses VFP registers for parameter passing and return values. AVR * The -mno-tablejump option has been removed because it has the same effect as the -fno-jump-tables option. * Added support for these new AVR devices: + ATmega8U2 + ATmega16U2 + ATmega32U2 IA-32/x86-64 * GCC now will set the default for -march= based on the configure target. * GCC now supports handling floating-point excess precision arising from use of the x87 floating-point unit in a way that conforms to ISO C99. This is enabled with -fexcess-precision=standard and with standards conformance options such as -std=c99, and may be disabled using -fexcess-precision=fast. * Support for the Intel Atom processor is now available through the -march=atom and -mtune=atom options. * A new -mcrc32 option is now available to enable crc32 intrinsics. * A new -mmovbe option is now available to enable GCC to use the movbe instruction to implement __builtin_bswap32 and __builtin_bswap64. * SSE math now can be enabled by default at configure time with the new --with-fpmath=sse option. * There is a new intrinsic header file, . It should be included before using any IA-32/x86-64 intrinsics. * Support for the XOP, FMA4, and LWP instruction sets for the AMD Orochi processors are now available with the -mxop, -mfma4, and -mlwp options. * The -mabm option enables GCC to use the popcnt and lzcnt instructions on AMD processors. * The -mpopcnt option enables GCC to use the popcnt instructions on both AMD and Intel processors. M68K/ColdFire * GCC now supports ColdFire 51xx, 5221x, 5225x, 52274, 52277, 5301x and 5441x devices. * GCC now supports thread-local storage (TLS) on M68K and ColdFire processors. MeP Support has been added for the Toshiba Media embedded Processor (MeP, or mep-elf) embedded target. MIPS * GCC now supports MIPS 1004K processors. * GCC can now be configured with options --with-arch-32, --with-arch-64, --with-tune-32 and --with-tune-64 to control the default optimization separately for 32-bit and 64-bit modes. * MIPS targets now support an alternative _mcount interface, in which register $12 points to the function's save slot for register $31. This interface is selected by the -mcount-ra-address option; see the documentation for more details. * GNU/Linux targets can now generate read-only .eh_frame sections. This optimization requires GNU binutils 2.20 or above, and is only available if GCC is configured with a suitable version of binutils. * GNU/Linux targets can now attach special relocations to indirect calls, so that the linker can turn them into direct jumps or branches. This optimization requires GNU binutils 2.20 or later, and is automatically selected if GCC is configured with an appropriate version of binutils. It can be explicitly enabled or disabled using the -mrelax-pic-calls command-line option. * GCC now generates more heavily-optimized atomic operations on Octeon processors. * MIPS targets now support the -fstack-protector option. * GCC now supports an -msynci option, which specifies that synci is enough to flush the instruction cache, without help from the operating system. GCC uses this information to optimize automatically-generated cache flush operations, such as those used for nested functions in C. There is also a --with-synci configure-time option, which makes -msynci the default. * GCC supports four new function attributes for interrupt handlers: interrupt, use_shadow_register_set, keep_interrupts_masked and use_debug_exception_return. See the documentation for more details about these attributes. picochip RS/6000 (POWER/PowerPC) * GCC now supports the Power ISA 2.06, which includes the VSX instructions that add vector 64-bit floating point support, new population count instructions, and conversions between floating point and unsigned types. * Support for the power7 processor is now available through the -mcpu=power7 and -mtune=power7. * GCC will now vectorize loops that contain simple math functions like copysign when generating code for altivec or VSX targets. * Support for the A2 processor is now available through the -mcpu=a2 and -mtune=a2 options. * Support for the 476 processor is now available through the -mcpu={476,476fp} and -mtune={476,476fp} options. * Support for the e500mc64 processor is now available through the -mcpu=e500mc64 and -mtune=e500mc64 options. * GCC can now be configured with options --with-cpu-32, --with-cpu-64, --with-tune-32 and --with-tune-64 to control the default optimization separately for 32-bit and 64-bit modes. * Starting with GCC 4.5.4, vectors of type vector long long or vector long are passed and returned in the same method as other vectors with the VSX instruction set. Previously the GCC compiler did not adhere to the ABI for 128-bit vectors with 64-bit integer base types (PR 48857). This is also fixed in the GCC 4.6.1 release. RX Support has been added for the Renesas RX Processor (rx-elf) target. Operating Systems Windows (Cygwin and MinGW) * GCC now installs all the major language runtime libraries as DLLs when configured with the --enable-shared option. * GCC now makes use of the new support for aligned common variables in versions of binutils >= 2.20 to fix bugs in the support for SSE data types. * Improvements to the libffi support library increase the reliability of code generated by GCJ on all Windows platforms. Libgcj is enabled by default for the first time. * Libtool improvements simplify installation by placing the generated DLLs in the correct binaries directory. * Numerous other minor bugfixes and improvements, and substantial enhancements to the Fortran language support library. Documentation improvements Other significant improvements Plugins * It is now possible to extend the compiler without having to modify its source code. A new option -fplugin=file.so tells GCC to load the shared object file.so and execute it as part of the compiler. The internal documentation describes the details on how plugins can interact with the compiler. Installation changes * The move to newer autotools changed default installation directories and switches to control them: The --with-datarootdir, --with-docdir, --with-pdfdir, and --with-htmldir switches are not used any more. Instead, you can now use --datarootdir, --docdir, --htmldir, and --pdfdir. The default installation directories have changed as follows according to the GNU Coding Standards: datarootdir read-only architecture-independent data root [PREFIX/share] localedir locale-specific message catalogs [DATAROOTDIR/locale] docdir documentation root [DATAROOTDIR/doc/PACKAGE] htmldir html documentation [DOCDIR] dvidir dvi documentation [DOCDIR] pdfdir pdf documentation [DOCDIR] psdir ps documentation [DOCDIR] The following variables have new default values: datadir read-only architecture-independent data [DATAROOTDIR] infodir info documentation [DATAROOTDIR/info] mandir man documentation [DATAROOTDIR/man] GCC 4.5.1 This is the [24]list of problem reports (PRs) from GCC's bug tracking system that are known to be fixed in the 4.5.1 release. This list might not be complete (that is, it is possible that some PRs that have been fixed are not listed here). All languages * GCC's new link-time optimizer ([25]-flto) now also works on a few non-ELF targets: + Cygwin (*-cygwin*) + MinGW (*-mingw*) + Darwin on x86-64 (x86_64-apple-darwin*) LTO is not enabled by default for these targets. To enable LTO, you should configure with the --enable-lto option. GCC 4.5.2 This is the [26]list of problem reports (PRs) from GCC's bug tracking system that are known to be fixed in the 4.5.2 release. This list might not be complete (that is, it is possible that some PRs that have been fixed are not listed here). GCC 4.5.3 This is the [27]list of problem reports (PRs) from GCC's bug tracking system that are known to be fixed in the 4.5.2 release. This list might not be complete (that is, it is possible that some PRs that have been fixed are not listed here). On the PowerPC compiler, the altivec builtin functions vec_ld and vec_st have been modified to generate the Altivec memory instructions LVX and STVX, even if the -mvsx option is used. In the initial GCC 4.5 release, these builtin functions were changed to generate VSX memory reference instructions instead of Altivec memory instructions, but there are differences between the two instructions. If the VSX instruction set is available, you can now use the new builtin functions vec_vsx_ld and vec_vsx_st which always generates the VSX memory instructions. For questions related to the use of GCC, please consult these web pages and the [28]GCC manuals. If that fails, the [29]gcc-help@gcc.gnu.org mailing list might help. Comments on these web pages and the development of GCC are welcome on our developer list at [30]gcc@gcc.gnu.org. All of [31]our lists have public archives. Copyright (C) [32]Free Software Foundation, Inc. Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium, provided this notice is preserved. These pages are [33]maintained by the GCC team. Last modified 2011-05-11[34]. References 1. http://www.multiprecision.org/ 2. http://gcc.gnu.org/install/prerequisites.html 3. http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2010-01/msg00510.html 4. http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.4/changes.html#obsoleted 5. http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.5/changes.html#x86 6. http://www.multiprecision.org/ 7. http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=30789 8. http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Optimize-Options.html#index-flto-801 9. http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Optimize-Options.html#index-fwhopr-802 10. http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Optimize-Options.html#index-fwhole-program-800 11. http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Restricted-Pointers.html 12. http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.5/cxx0x_status.html 13. http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/cwg_defects.html#757 14. http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/cwg_defects.html#176 15. http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/libstdc++/manual/status.html#status.iso.200x 16. http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/libstdc++/manual/profile_mode.html 17. http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/libstdc++/manual/status.html#status.iso.tr24733 18. http://sourceware.org/gdb/wiki/STLSupport 19. http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.4/changes.html 20. http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gfortran/Code-Gen-Options.html 21. http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gfortran/Mixed-Language-Programming.html 22. http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gfortran/GNU-Fortran-Compiler-Directives.html 23. http://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/OOP 24. http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/buglist.cgi?bug_status=RESOLVED&resolution=FIXED&target_milestone=4.5.1 25. http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Optimize-Options.html#index-flto-801 26. http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/buglist.cgi?bug_status=RESOLVED&resolution=FIXED&target_milestone=4.5.2 27. http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/buglist.cgi?bug_status=RESOLVED&resolution=FIXED&target_milestone=4.5.3 28. http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/ 29. mailto:gcc-help@gcc.gnu.org 30. mailto:gcc@gcc.gnu.org 31. http://gcc.gnu.org/lists.html 32. http://www.fsf.org/ 33. http://gcc.gnu.org/about.html 34. http://validator.w3.org/check/referer ====================================================================== http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.4/index.html GCC 4.4 Release Series April 16, 2011 The [1]GNU project and the GCC developers are pleased to announce the release of GCC 4.4.6. This release is a bug-fix release, containing fixes for regressions in GCC 4.4.5 relative to previous releases of GCC. Release History GCC 4.4.6 April 16, 2011 ([2]changes) GCC 4.4.5 October 1, 2010 ([3]changes) GCC 4.4.4 April 29, 2010 ([4]changes) GCC 4.4.3 January 21, 2010 ([5]changes) GCC 4.4.2 October 15, 2009 ([6]changes) GCC 4.4.1 July 22, 2009 ([7]changes) GCC 4.4.0 April 21, 2009 ([8]changes) References and Acknowledgements GCC used to stand for the GNU C Compiler, but since the compiler supports several other languages aside from C, it now stands for the GNU Compiler Collection. A list of [9]successful builds is updated as new information becomes available. The GCC developers would like to thank the numerous people that have contributed new features, improvements, bug fixes, and other changes as well as test results to GCC. This [10]amazing group of volunteers is what makes GCC successful. For additional information about GCC please refer to the [11]GCC project web site or contact the [12]GCC development mailing list. To obtain GCC please use [13]our mirror sites or [14]our SVN server. For questions related to the use of GCC, please consult these web pages and the [15]GCC manuals. If that fails, the [16]gcc-help@gcc.gnu.org mailing list might help. Comments on these web pages and the development of GCC are welcome on our developer list at [17]gcc@gcc.gnu.org. All of [18]our lists have public archives. Copyright (C) [19]Free Software Foundation, Inc. Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium, provided this notice is preserved. These pages are [20]maintained by the GCC team. Last modified 2011-04-25[21]. References 1. http://www.gnu.org/ 2. http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.4/changes.html 3. http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.4/changes.html 4. http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.4/changes.html 5. http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.4/changes.html 6. http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.4/changes.html 7. http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.4/changes.html 8. http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.4/changes.html 9. http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.4/buildstat.html 10. http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Contributors.html 11. http://gcc.gnu.org/index.html 12. mailto:gcc@gcc.gnu.org 13. http://gcc.gnu.org/mirrors.html 14. http://gcc.gnu.org/svn.html 15. http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/ 16. mailto:gcc-help@gcc.gnu.org 17. mailto:gcc@gcc.gnu.org 18. http://gcc.gnu.org/lists.html 19. http://www.fsf.org/ 20. http://gcc.gnu.org/about.html 21. http://validator.w3.org/check/referer ====================================================================== http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.4/changes.html GCC 4.4 Release Series Changes, New Features, and Fixes The latest release in the 4.4 release series is [1]GCC 4.4.6. Caveats * __builtin_stdarg_start has been completely removed from GCC. Support for had been deprecated since GCC 4.0. Use __builtin_va_start as a replacement. * Some of the errors issued by the C++ front end that could be downgraded to warnings in previous releases by using -fpermissive are now warnings by default. They can be converted into errors by using -pedantic-errors. * Use of the cpp assertion extension will now emit a warning when -Wdeprecated or -pedantic is used. This extension has been deprecated for many years, but never warned about. * Packed bit-fields of type char were not properly bit-packed on many targets prior to GCC 4.4. On these targets, the fix in GCC 4.4 causes an ABI change. For example there is no longer a 4-bit padding between field a and b in this structure: struct foo { char a:4; char b:8; } __attribute__ ((packed)); There is a new warning to help identify fields that are affected: foo.c:5: note: Offset of packed bit-field 'b' has changed in GCC 4.4 The warning can be disabled with -Wno-packed-bitfield-compat. * On ARM EABI targets, the C++ mangling of the va_list type has been changed to conform to the current revision of the EABI. This does not affect the libstdc++ library included with GCC. * The SCOUNT and POS bits of the MIPS DSP control register are now treated as global. Previous versions of GCC treated these fields as call-clobbered instead. * The MIPS port no longer recognizes the h asm constraint. It was necessary to remove this constraint in order to avoid generating unpredictable code sequences. One of the main uses of the h constraint was to extract the high part of a multiplication on 64-bit targets. For example: asm ("dmultu\t%1,%2" : "=h" (result) : "r" (x), "r" (y)); You can now achieve the same effect using 128-bit types: typedef unsigned int uint128_t __attribute__((mode(TI))); result = ((uint128_t) x * y) >> 64; The second sequence is better in many ways. For example, if x and y are constants, the compiler can perform the multiplication at compile time. If x and y are not constants, the compiler can schedule the runtime multiplication better than it can schedule an asm statement. * Support for a number of older systems and recently unmaintained or untested target ports of GCC has been declared obsolete in GCC 4.4. Unless there is activity to revive them, the next release of GCC will have their sources permanently removed. The following ports for individual systems on particular architectures have been obsoleted: + Generic a.out on IA32 and m68k (i[34567]86-*-aout*, m68k-*-aout*) + Generic COFF on ARM, H8300, IA32, m68k and SH (arm-*-coff*, armel-*-coff*, h8300-*-*, i[34567]86-*-coff*, m68k-*-coff*, sh-*-*). This does not affect other more specific targets using the COFF object format on those architectures, or the more specific H8300 and SH targets (h8300-*-rtems*, h8300-*-elf*, sh-*-elf*, sh-*-symbianelf*, sh-*-linux*, sh-*-netbsdelf*, sh-*-rtems*, sh-wrs-vxworks). + 2BSD on PDP-11 (pdp11-*-bsd) + AIX 4.1 and 4.2 on PowerPC (rs6000-ibm-aix4.[12]*, powerpc-ibm-aix4.[12]*) + Tuning support for Itanium1 (Merced) variants. Note that code tuned for Itanium2 should also run correctly on Itanium1. * The protoize and unprotoize utilities have been obsoleted and will be removed in GCC 4.5. These utilities have not been installed by default since GCC 3.0. * Support has been removed for all the [2]configurations obsoleted in GCC 4.3. * Unknown -Wno-* options are now silently ignored by GCC if no other diagnostics are issued. If other diagnostics are issued, then GCC warns about the unknown options. * More information on porting to GCC 4.4 from previous versions of GCC can be found in the [3]porting guide for this release. General Optimizer Improvements * A new command-line switch -findirect-inlining has been added. When turned on it allows the inliner to also inline indirect calls that are discovered to have known targets at compile time thanks to previous inlining. * A new command-line switch -ftree-switch-conversion has been added. This new pass turns simple initializations of scalar variables in switch statements into initializations from a static array, given that all the values are known at compile time and the ratio between the new array size and the original switch branches does not exceed the parameter --param switch-conversion-max-branch-ratio (default is eight). * A new command-line switch -ftree-builtin-call-dce has been added. This optimization eliminates unnecessary calls to certain builtin functions when the return value is not used, in cases where the calls can not be eliminated entirely because the function may set errno. This optimization is on by default at -O2 and above. * A new command-line switch -fconserve-stack directs the compiler to minimize stack usage even if it makes the generated code slower. This affects inlining decisions. * When the assembler supports it, the compiler will now emit unwind information using assembler .cfi directives. This makes it possible to use such directives in inline assembler code. The new option -fno-dwarf2-cfi-asm directs the compiler to not use .cfi directives. * The [4]Graphite branch has been merged. This merge has brought in a new framework for loop optimizations based on a polyhedral intermediate representation. These optimizations apply to all the languages supported by GCC. The following new code transformations are available in GCC 4.4: + -floop-interchange performs loop interchange transformations on loops. Interchanging two nested loops switches the inner and outer loops. For example, given a loop like: DO J = 1, M DO I = 1, N A(J, I) = A(J, I) * C ENDDO ENDDO loop interchange will transform the loop as if the user had written: DO I = 1, N DO J = 1, M A(J, I) = A(J, I) * C ENDDO ENDDO which can be beneficial when N is larger than the caches, because in Fortran, the elements of an array are stored in memory contiguously by column, and the original loop iterates over rows, potentially creating at each access a cache miss. + -floop-strip-mine performs loop strip mining transformations on loops. Strip mining splits a loop into two nested loops. The outer loop has strides equal to the strip size and the inner loop has strides of the original loop within a strip. For example, given a loop like: DO I = 1, N A(I) = A(I) + C ENDDO loop strip mining will transform the loop as if the user had written: DO II = 1, N, 4 DO I = II, min (II + 3, N) A(I) = A(I) + C ENDDO ENDDO + -floop-block performs loop blocking transformations on loops. Blocking strip mines each loop in the loop nest such that the memory accesses of the element loops fit inside caches. For example, given a loop like: DO I = 1, N DO J = 1, M A(J, I) = B(I) + C(J) ENDDO ENDDO loop blocking will transform the loop as if the user had written: DO II = 1, N, 64 DO JJ = 1, M, 64 DO I = II, min (II + 63, N) DO J = JJ, min (JJ + 63, M) A(J, I) = B(I) + C(J) ENDDO ENDDO ENDDO ENDDO which can be beneficial when M is larger than the caches, because the innermost loop will iterate over a smaller amount of data that can be kept in the caches. * A new register allocator has replaced the old one. It is called integrated register allocator (IRA) because coalescing, register live range splitting, and hard register preferencing are done on-the-fly during coloring. It also has better integration with the reload pass. IRA is a regional register allocator which uses modern Chaitin-Briggs coloring instead of Chow's priority coloring used in the old register allocator. More info about IRA internals and options can be found in the GCC manuals. * A new instruction scheduler and software pipeliner, based on the selective scheduling approach, has been added. The new pass performs instruction unification, register renaming, substitution through register copies, and speculation during scheduling. The software pipeliner is able to pipeline non-countable loops. The new pass is targeted at scheduling-eager in-order platforms. In GCC 4.4 it is available for the Intel Itanium platform working by default as the second scheduling pass (after register allocation) at the -O3 optimization level. * When using -fprofile-generate with a multi-threaded program, the profile counts may be slightly wrong due to race conditions. The new -fprofile-correction option directs the compiler to apply heuristics to smooth out the inconsistencies. By default the compiler will give an error message when it finds an inconsistent profile. * The new -fprofile-dir=PATH option permits setting the directory where profile data files are stored when using -fprofile-generate and friends, and the directory used when reading profile data files using -fprofile-use and friends. New warning options * The new -Wframe-larger-than=NUMBER option directs GCC to emit a warning if any stack frame is larger than NUMBER bytes. This may be used to help ensure that code fits within a limited amount of stack space. * The command-line option -Wlarger-than-N is now written as -Wlarger-than=N and the old form is deprecated. * The new -Wno-mudflap option disables warnings about constructs which can not be instrumented when using -fmudflap. New Languages and Language specific improvements * Version 3.0 of the [5]OpenMP specification is now supported for the C, C++, and Fortran compilers. * New character data types, per [6]TR 19769: New character types in C, are now supported for the C compiler in -std=gnu99 mode, as __CHAR16_TYPE__ and __CHAR32_TYPE__, and for the C++ compiler in -std=c++0x and -std=gnu++0x modes, as char16_t and char32_t too. C family * A new optimize attribute was added to allow programmers to change the optimization level and particular optimization options for an individual function. You can also change the optimization options via the GCC optimize pragma for functions defined after the pragma. The GCC push_options pragma and the GCC pop_options pragma allow you temporarily save and restore the options used. The GCC reset_options pragma restores the options to what was specified on the command line. * Uninitialized warnings do not require enabling optimization anymore, that is, -Wuninitialized can be used together with -O0. Nonetheless, the warnings given by -Wuninitialized will probably be more accurate if optimization is enabled. * -Wparentheses now warns about expressions such as (!x | y) and (!x & y). Using explicit parentheses, such as in ((!x) | y), silences this warning. * -Wsequence-point now warns within if, while,do while and for conditions, and within for begin/end expressions. * A new option -dU is available to dump definitions of preprocessor macros that are tested or expanded. C++ * [7]Improved experimental support for the upcoming ISO C++ standard, C++0x. Including support for auto, inline namespaces, generalized initializer lists, defaulted and deleted functions, new character types, and scoped enums. * Those errors that may be downgraded to warnings to build legacy code now mention -fpermissive when -fdiagnostics-show-option is enabled. * -Wconversion now warns if the result of a static_cast to enumeral type is unspecified because the value is outside the range of the enumeral type. * -Wuninitialized now warns if a non-static reference or non-static const member appears in a class without constructors. * G++ now properly implements value-initialization, so objects with an initializer of () and an implicitly defined default constructor will be zero-initialized before the default constructor is called. Runtime Library (libstdc++) * [8]Improved experimental support for the upcoming ISO C++ standard, C++0x, including: + Support for , , , , , , , , and . + unique_ptr, additions, exception propagation, and support for the new character types in and . + Existing facilities now exploit initializer lists, defaulted and deleted functions, and the newly implemented core C++0x features. + Some standard containers are more efficient together with stateful allocators, i.e., no allocator is constructed on the fly at element construction time. * Experimental support for non-standard pointer types in containers. * The long standing libstdc++/30928 has been fixed for targets running glibc 2.10 or later. * As usual, many small and larger bug fixes, in particular quite a few corner cases in . Fortran * GNU Fortran now employs libcpp directly instead of using cc1 as an external preprocessor. The [9]-cpp option was added to allow manual invocation of the preprocessor without relying on filename extensions. * The [10]-Warray-temporaries option warns about array temporaries generated by the compiler, as an aid to optimization. * The [11]-fcheck-array-temporaries option has been added, printing a notification at run time, when an array temporary had to be created for an function argument. Contrary to -Warray-temporaries the warning is only printed if the array is noncontiguous. * Improved generation of DWARF debugging symbols * If using an intrinsic not part of the selected standard (via -std= and -fall-intrinsics) gfortran will now treat it as if this procedure were declared EXTERNAL and try to link to a user-supplied procedure. -Wintrinsics-std will warn whenever this happens. The now-useless option -Wnonstd-intrinsic was removed. * The flag -falign-commons has been added to control the alignment of variables in COMMON blocks, which is enabled by default in line with previous GCC version. Using -fno-align-commons one can force commons to be contiguous in memory as required by the Fortran standard, however, this slows down the memory access. The option -Walign-commons, which is enabled by default, warns when padding bytes were added for alignment. The proper solution is to sort the common objects by decreasing storage size, which avoids the alignment problems. * Fortran 2003 support has been extended: + Wide characters (ISO 10646, UCS-4, kind=4) and UTF-8 I/O is now supported (except internal reads from/writes to wide strings). [12]-fbackslash now supports also \unnnn and \Unnnnnnnn to enter Unicode characters. + Asynchronous I/O (implemented as synchronous I/O) and the decimal=, size=, sign=, pad=, blank=, and delim= specifiers are now supported in I/O statements. + Support for Fortran 2003 structure constructors and for array constructor with typespec has been added. + Procedure Pointers (but not yet as component in derived types and as function results) are now supported. + Abstract types, type extension, and type-bound procedures (both PROCEDURE and GENERIC but not as operators). Note: As CLASS/polymorphyic types are not implemented, type-bound procedures with PASS accept as non-standard extension TYPE arguments. * Fortran 2008 support has been added: + The -std=f2008 option and support for the file extensions .f2008 and .F2008 has been added. + The g0 format descriptor is now supported. + The Fortran 2008 mathematical intrinsics ASINH, ACOSH, ATANH, ERF, ERFC, GAMMA, LOG_GAMMA, BESSEL_*, HYPOT, and ERFC_SCALED are now available (some of them existed as GNU extension before). Note: The hyperbolic functions are not yet supporting complex arguments and the three- argument version of BESSEL_*N is not available. + The bit intrinsics LEADZ and TRAILZ have been added. Java (GCJ) Ada * The Ada runtime now supports multilibs on many platforms including x86_64, SPARC and PowerPC. Their build is enabled by default. New Targets and Target Specific Improvements ARM * GCC now supports optimizing for the Cortex-A9, Cortex-R4 and Cortex-R4F processors and has many other improvements to optimization for ARM processors. * GCC now supports the VFPv3 variant with 16 double-precision registers with -mfpu=vfpv3-d16. The option -mfpu=vfp3 has been renamed to -mfpu=vfpv3. * GCC now supports the -mfix-cortex-m3-ldrd option to work around an erratum on Cortex-M3 processors. * GCC now supports the __sync_* atomic operations for ARM EABI GNU/Linux. * The section anchors optimization is now enabled by default when optimizing for ARM. * GCC now uses a new EABI-compatible profiling interface for EABI targets. This requires a function __gnu_mcount_nc, which is provided by GNU libc versions 2.8 and later. AVR * The -mno-tablejump option has been deprecated because it has the same effect as the -fno-jump-tables option. * Added support for these new AVR devices: + ATA6289 + ATtiny13A + ATtiny87 + ATtiny167 + ATtiny327 + ATmega8C1 + ATmega16C1 + ATmega32C1 + ATmega8M1 + ATmega16M1 + ATmega32M1 + ATmega32U4 + ATmega16HVB + ATmega4HVD + ATmega8HVD + ATmega64C1 + ATmega64M1 + ATmega16U4 + ATmega32U6 + ATmega128RFA1 + AT90PWM81 + AT90SCR100 + M3000F + M3000S + M3001B IA-32/x86-64 * Support for Intel AES built-in functions and code generation is available via -maes. * Support for Intel PCLMUL built-in function and code generation is available via -mpclmul. * Support for Intel AVX built-in functions and code generation is available via -mavx. * Automatically align the stack for local variables with alignment requirement. * GCC can now utilize the SVML library for vectorizing calls to a set of C99 functions if -mveclibabi=svml is specified and you link to an SVML ABI compatible library. * On x86-64, the ABI has been changed in the following cases to conform to the x86-64 ABI: + Passing/returning structures with flexible array member: struct foo { int i; int flex[]; }; + Passing/returning structures with complex float member: struct foo { int i; __complex__ float f; }; + Passing/returning unions with long double member: union foo { int x; long double ld; }; Code built with previous versions of GCC that uses any of these is not compatible with code built with GCC 4.4.0 or later. * A new target attribute was added to allow programmers to change the target options like -msse2 or -march=k8 for an individual function. You can also change the target options via the GCC target pragma for functions defined after the pragma. * GCC can now be configured with options --with-arch-32, --with-arch-64, --with-cpu-32, --with-cpu-64, --with-tune-32 and --with-tune-64 to control the default optimization separately for 32-bit and 64-bit modes. IA-32/IA64 * Support for __float128 (TFmode) IEEE quad type and corresponding TCmode IEEE complex quad type is available via the soft-fp library on IA-32/IA64 targets. This includes basic arithmetic operations (addition, subtraction, negation, multiplication and division) on __float128 real and TCmode complex values, the full set of IEEE comparisons between __float128 values, conversions to and from float, double and long double floating point types, as well as conversions to and from signed or unsigned integer, signed or unsigned long integer and signed or unsigned quad (TImode, IA64 only) integer types. Additionally, all operations generate the full set of IEEE exceptions and support the full set of IEEE rounding modes. M68K/ColdFire * GCC now supports instruction scheduling for ColdFire V1, V3 and V4 processors. (Scheduling support for ColdFire V2 processors was added in GCC 4.3.) * GCC now supports the -mxgot option to support programs requiring many GOT entries on ColdFire. * The m68k-*-linux-gnu target now builds multilibs by default. MIPS * MIPS Technologies have extended the original MIPS SVR4 ABI to include support for procedure linkage tables (PLTs) and copy relocations. These extensions allow GNU/Linux executables to use a significantly more efficient code model than the one defined by the original ABI. GCC support for this code model is available via a new command-line option, -mplt. There is also a new configure-time option, --with-mips-plt, to make -mplt the default. The new code model requires support from the assembler, the linker, and the runtime C library. This support is available in binutils 2.19 and GLIBC 2.9. * GCC can now generate MIPS16 code for 32-bit GNU/Linux executables and 32-bit GNU/Linux shared libraries. This feature requires GNU binutils 2.19 or above. * Support for RMI's XLR processor is now available through the -march=xlr and -mtune=xlr options. * 64-bit targets can now perform 128-bit multiplications inline, instead of relying on a libgcc function. * Native GNU/Linux toolchains now support -march=native and -mtune=native, which select the host processor. * GCC now supports the R10K, R12K, R14K and R16K processors. The canonical -march= and -mtune= names for these processors are r10000, r12000, r14000 and r16000 respectively. * GCC can now work around the side effects of speculative execution on R10K processors. Please see the documentation of the -mr10k-cache-barrier option for details. * Support for the MIPS64 Release 2 instruction set has been added. The option -march=mips64r2 enables generation of these instructions. * GCC now supports Cavium Networks' Octeon processor. This support is available through the -march=octeon and -mtune=octeon options. * GCC now supports STMicroelectronics' Loongson 2E/2F processors. The canonical -march= and -mtune= names for these processors are loongson2e and loongson2f. picochip Picochip is a 16-bit processor. A typical picoChip contains over 250 small cores, each with small amounts of memory. There are three processor variants (STAN, MEM and CTRL) with different instruction sets and memory configurations and they can be chosen using the -mae option. This port is intended to be a "C" only port. Power Architecture and PowerPC * GCC now supports the e300c2, e300c3 and e500mc processors. * GCC now supports Xilinx processors with a single-precision FPU. * Decimal floating point is now supported for e500 processors. S/390, zSeries and System z9/z10 * Support for the IBM System z10 EC/BC processor has been added. When using the -march=z10 option, the compiler will generate code making use of instructions provided by the General-Instruction-Extension Facility and the Execute-Extension Facility. VxWorks * GCC now supports the thread-local storage mechanism used on VxWorks. Xtensa * GCC now supports thread-local storage (TLS) for Xtensa processor configurations that include the Thread Pointer option. TLS also requires support from the assembler and linker; this support is provided in the GNU binutils beginning with version 2.19. Documentation improvements Other significant improvements GCC 4.4.1 This is the [13]list of problem reports (PRs) from GCC's bug tracking system that are known to be fixed in the 4.4.1 release. This list might not be complete (that is, it is possible that some PRs that have been fixed are not listed here). GCC 4.4.2 This is the [14]list of problem reports (PRs) from GCC's bug tracking system that are known to be fixed in the 4.4.2 release. This list might not be complete (that is, it is possible that some PRs that have been fixed are not listed here). GCC 4.4.3 This is the [15]list of problem reports (PRs) from GCC's bug tracking system that are known to be fixed in the 4.4.3 release. This list might not be complete (that is, it is possible that some PRs that have been fixed are not listed here). GCC 4.4.4 This is the [16]list of problem reports (PRs) from GCC's bug tracking system that are known to be fixed in the 4.4.4 release. This list might not be complete (that is, it is possible that some PRs that have been fixed are not listed here). GCC 4.4.5 This is the [17]list of problem reports (PRs) from GCC's bug tracking system that are known to be fixed in the 4.4.5 release. This list might not be complete (that is, it is possible that some PRs that have been fixed are not listed here). GCC 4.4.6 This is the [18]list of problem reports (PRs) from GCC's bug tracking system that are known to be fixed in the 4.4.6 release. This list might not be complete (that is, it is possible that some PRs that have been fixed are not listed here). For questions related to the use of GCC, please consult these web pages and the [19]GCC manuals. If that fails, the [20]gcc-help@gcc.gnu.org mailing list might help. Comments on these web pages and the development of GCC are welcome on our developer list at [21]gcc@gcc.gnu.org. All of [22]our lists have public archives. Copyright (C) [23]Free Software Foundation, Inc. Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium, provided this notice is preserved. These pages are [24]maintained by the GCC team. Last modified 2011-04-25[25]. References 1. http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.4/changes.html#4.4.6 2. http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.3/changes.html#obsoleted 3. http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.4/porting_to.html 4. http://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/Graphite 5. http://openmp.org/wp/openmp-specifications/ 6. http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg14/www/docs/n1040.pdf 7. http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.4/cxx0x_status.html 8. http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/libstdc++/manual/status.html#id476343 9. http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gfortran/Preprocessing-Options.html 10. http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gfortran/Error-and-Warning-Options.html#index-g_t_0040code_007bWarray-temporaries_007d-125 11. http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gfortran/Code-Gen-Options.html#index-g_t_0040code_007bfcheck-array-temporaries_007d-221 12. http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gfortran/Fortran-Dialect-Options.html#index-g_t_0040code_007bbackslash_007d-34 13. http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/buglist.cgi?bug_status=RESOLVED&resolution=FIXED&target_milestone=4.4.1 14. http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/buglist.cgi?bug_status=RESOLVED&resolution=FIXED&target_milestone=4.4.2 15. http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/buglist.cgi?bug_status=RESOLVED&resolution=FIXED&target_milestone=4.4.3 16. http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/buglist.cgi?bug_status=RESOLVED&resolution=FIXED&target_milestone=4.4.4 17. http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/buglist.cgi?bug_status=RESOLVED&resolution=FIXED&target_milestone=4.4.5 18. http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/buglist.cgi?bug_status=RESOLVED&resolution=FIXED&target_milestone=4.4.6 19. http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/ 20. mailto:gcc-help@gcc.gnu.org 21. mailto:gcc@gcc.gnu.org 22. http://gcc.gnu.org/lists.html 23. http://www.fsf.org/ 24. http://gcc.gnu.org/about.html 25. http://validator.w3.org/check/referer ====================================================================== http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.3/index.html GCC 4.3 Release Series Jun 27, 2011 The [1]GNU project and the GCC developers are pleased to announce the release of GCC 4.3.6. This release is a bug-fix release, containing fixes for regressions in GCC 4.3.5 relative to previous releases of GCC. Release History GCC 4.3.6 Jun 27, 2011 ([2]changes) GCC 4.3.5 May 22, 2010 ([3]changes) GCC 4.3.4 August 4, 2009 ([4]changes) GCC 4.3.3 January 24, 2009 ([5]changes) GCC 4.3.2 August 27, 2008 ([6]changes) GCC 4.3.1 June 6, 2008 ([7]changes) GCC 4.3.0 March 5, 2008 ([8]changes) References and Acknowledgements GCC used to stand for the GNU C Compiler, but since the compiler supports several other languages aside from C, it now stands for the GNU Compiler Collection. A list of [9]successful builds is updated as new information becomes available. The GCC developers would like to thank the numerous people that have contributed new features, improvements, bug fixes, and other changes as well as test results to GCC. This [10]amazing group of volunteers is what makes GCC successful. For additional information about GCC please refer to the [11]GCC project web site or contact the [12]GCC development mailing list. To obtain GCC please use [13]our mirror sites or [14]our SVN server. For questions related to the use of GCC, please consult these web pages and the [15]GCC manuals. If that fails, the [16]gcc-help@gcc.gnu.org mailing list might help. Comments on these web pages and the development of GCC are welcome on our developer list at [17]gcc@gcc.gnu.org. All of [18]our lists have public archives. Copyright (C) [19]Free Software Foundation, Inc. Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium, provided this notice is preserved. These pages are [20]maintained by the GCC team. Last modified 2011-06-27[21]. References 1. http://www.gnu.org/ 2. http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.3/changes.html 3. http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.3/changes.html 4. http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.3/changes.html 5. http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.3/changes.html 6. http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.3/changes.html 7. http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.3/changes.html 8. http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.3/changes.html 9. http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.3/buildstat.html 10. http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Contributors.html 11. http://gcc.gnu.org/index.html 12. mailto:gcc@gcc.gnu.org 13. http://gcc.gnu.org/mirrors.html 14. http://gcc.gnu.org/svn.html 15. http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/ 16. mailto:gcc-help@gcc.gnu.org 17. mailto:gcc@gcc.gnu.org 18. http://gcc.gnu.org/lists.html 19. http://www.fsf.org/ 20. http://gcc.gnu.org/about.html 21. http://validator.w3.org/check/referer ====================================================================== http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.3/changes.html GCC 4.3 Release Series Changes, New Features, and Fixes The latest release in the 4.3 release series is [1]GCC 4.3.5. Caveats * GCC requires the [2]GMP and [3]MPFR libraries for building all the various front-end languages it supports. See the [4]prerequisites page for version requirements. * ColdFire targets now treat long double as having the same format as double. In earlier versions of GCC, they used the 68881 long double format instead. * The m68k-uclinux target now uses the same calling conventions as m68k-linux-gnu. You can select the original calling conventions by configuring for m68k-uclinuxoldabi instead. Note that m68k-uclinuxoldabi also retains the original 80-bit long double on ColdFire targets. * The -fforce-mem option has been removed because it has had no effect in the last few GCC releases. * The i386 -msvr3-shlib option has been removed since it is no longer used. * Fastcall for i386 has been changed not to pass aggregate arguments in registers, following Microsoft compilers. * Support for the AOF assembler has been removed from the ARM back end; this affects only the targets arm-semi-aof and armel-semi-aof, which are no longer recognized. We removed these targets without a deprecation period because we discovered that they have been unusable since GCC 4.0.0. * Support for the TMS320C3x/C4x processor (targets c4x-* and tic4x-*) has been removed. This support had been deprecated since GCC 4.0.0. * Support for a number of older systems and recently unmaintained or untested target ports of GCC has been declared obsolete in GCC 4.3. Unless there is activity to revive them, the next release of GCC will have their sources permanently removed. All GCC ports for the following processor architectures have been declared obsolete: + Morpho MT (mt-*) The following aliases for processor architectures have been declared obsolete. Users should use the indicated generic target names instead, with compile-time options such as -mcpu or configure-time options such as --with-cpu to control the configuration more precisely. + strongarm*-*-*, ep9312*-*-*, xscale*-*-* (use arm*-*-* instead). + parisc*-*-* (use hppa*-*-* instead). + m680[012]0-*-* (use m68k-*-* instead). All GCC ports for the following operating systems have been declared obsolete: + BeOS (*-*-beos*) + kaOS (*-*-kaos*) + GNU/Linux using the a.out object format (*-*-linux*aout*) + GNU/Linux using version 1 of the GNU C Library (*-*-linux*libc1*) + Solaris versions before Solaris 7 (*-*-solaris2.[0-6], *-*-solaris2.[0-6].*) + Miscellaneous System V (*-*-sysv*) + WindISS (*-*-windiss*) Also, those for some individual systems on particular architectures have been obsoleted: + UNICOS/mk on DEC Alpha (alpha*-*-unicosmk*) + CRIS with a.out object format (cris-*-aout) + BSD 4.3 on PA-RISC (hppa1.1-*-bsd*) + OSF/1 on PA-RISC (hppa1.1-*-osf*) + PRO on PA-RISC (hppa1.1-*-pro*) + Sequent PTX on IA32 (i[34567]86-sequent-ptx4*, i[34567]86-sequent-sysv4*) + SCO Open Server 5 on IA32 (i[34567]86-*-sco3.2v5*) + UWIN on IA32 (i[34567]86-*-uwin*) (support for UWIN as a host was previously [5]removed in 2001, leaving only the support for UWIN as a target now being deprecated) + ChorusOS on PowerPC (powerpc-*-chorusos*) + All VAX configurations apart from NetBSD and OpenBSD (vax-*-bsd*, vax-*-sysv*, vax-*-ultrix*) * The [6]-Wconversion option has been modified. Its purpose now is to warn for implicit conversions that may alter a value. This new behavior is available for both C and C++. Warnings about conversions between signed and unsigned integers can be disabled by using -Wno-sign-conversion. In C++, they are disabled by default unless -Wsign-conversion is explicitly requested. The old behavior of -Wconversion, that is, warn for prototypes causing a type conversion that is different from what would happen to the same argument in the absence of a prototype, has been moved to a new option -Wtraditional-conversion, which is only available for C. * The -m386, -m486, -mpentium and -mpentiumpro tuning options have been removed because they were deprecated for more than 3 GCC major releases. Use -mtune=i386, -mtune=i486, -mtune=pentium or -mtune=pentiumpro as a replacement. * The -funsafe-math-optimizations option now automatically turns on -fno-trapping-math in addition to -fno-signed-zeros, as it enables reassociation and thus may introduce or remove traps. * The -ftree-vectorize option is now on by default under -O3. In order to generate code for a SIMD extension, it has to be enabled as well: use -maltivec for PowerPC platforms and -msse/-msse2 for i?86 and x86_64. * More information on porting to GCC 4.3 from previous versions of GCC can be found in the [7]porting guide for this release. General Optimizer Improvements * The GCC middle-end has been integrated with the [8]MPFR library. This allows GCC to evaluate and replace at compile-time calls to built-in math functions having constant arguments with their mathematically equivalent results. In making use of [9]MPFR, GCC can generate correct results regardless of the math library implementation or floating point precision of the host platform. This also allows GCC to generate identical results regardless of whether one compiles in native or cross-compile configurations to a particular target. The following built-in functions take advantage of this new capability: acos, acosh, asin, asinh, atan2, atan, atanh, cbrt, cos, cosh, drem, erf, erfc, exp10, exp2, exp, expm1, fdim, fma, fmax, fmin, gamma_r, hypot, j0, j1, jn, lgamma_r, log10, log1p, log2, log, pow10, pow, remainder, remquo, sin, sincos, sinh, tan, tanh, tgamma, y0, y1 and yn. The float and long double variants of these functions (e.g. sinf and sinl) are also handled. The sqrt and cabs functions with constant arguments were already optimized in prior GCC releases. Now they also use [10]MPFR. * A new forward propagation pass on RTL was added. The new pass replaces several slower transformations, resulting in compile-time improvements as well as better code generation in some cases. * A new command-line switch -frecord-gcc-switches has been added to GCC, although it is only enabled for some targets. The switch causes the command line that was used to invoke the compiler to be recorded into the object file that is being created. The exact format of this recording is target and binary file format dependent, but it usually takes the form of a note section containing ASCII text. The switch is related to the -fverbose-asm switch, but that one only records the information in the assembler output file as comments, so the information never reaches the object file. * The inliner heuristic is now aware of stack frame consumption. New command-line parameters --param large-stack-frame and --param large-stack-frame-growth can be used to limit stack frame size growth caused by inlining. * During feedback directed optimizations, the expected block size the memcpy, memset and bzero functions operate on is discovered and for cases of commonly used small sizes, specialized inline code is generated. * __builtin_expect no longer requires its argument to be a compile time constant. * Interprocedural optimization was reorganized to work on functions in SSA form. This enables more precise and cheaper dataflow analysis and makes writing interprocedural optimizations easier. The following improvements have been implemented on top of this framework: + Pre-inline optimization: Selected local optimization passes are run before the inliner (and other interprocedural passes) are executed. This significantly improves the accuracy of code growth estimates used by the inliner and reduces the overall memory footprint for large compilation units. + Early inlining (a simple bottom-up inliner pass inlining only functions whose body is smaller than the expected call overhead) is now executed with the early optimization passes, thus inlining already optimized function bodies into an unoptimized function that is subsequently optimized by early optimizers. This enables the compiler to quickly eliminate abstraction penalty in C++ programs. + Interprocedural constant propagation now operate on SSA form increasing accuracy of the analysis. * A new internal representation for GIMPLE statements has been contributed, resulting in compile-time memory savings. * The vectorizer was enhanced to support vectorization of outer loops, intra-iteration parallelism (loop-aware SLP), vectorization of strided accesses and loops with multiple data-types. Run-time dependency testing using loop versioning was added. The cost model, turned on by -fvect-cost-model, was developed. New Languages and Language specific improvements * We have added new command-line options -finstrument-functions-exclude-function-list and -finstrument-functions-exclude-file-list. They provide more control over which functions are annotated by the -finstrument-functions option. C family * Implicit conversions between generic vector types are now only permitted when the two vectors in question have the same number of elements and compatible element types. (Note that the restriction involves compatible element types, not implicitly-convertible element types: thus, a vector type with element type int may not be implicitly converted to a vector type with element type unsigned int.) This restriction, which is in line with specifications for SIMD architectures such as AltiVec, may be relaxed using the flag -flax-vector-conversions. This flag is intended only as a compatibility measure and should not be used for new code. * -Warray-bounds has been added and is now enabled by default for -Wall . It produces warnings for array subscripts that can be determined at compile time to be always out of bounds. -Wno-array-bounds will disable the warning. * The constructor and destructor function attributes now accept optional priority arguments which control the order in which the constructor and destructor functions are run. * New [11]command-line options -Wtype-limits, -Wold-style-declaration, -Wmissing-parameter-type, -Wempty-body, -Wclobbered and -Wignored-qualifiers have been added for finer control of the diverse warnings enabled by -Wextra. * A new function attribute alloc_size has been added to mark up malloc style functions. For constant sized allocations this can be used to find out the size of the returned pointer using the __builtin_object_size() function for buffer overflow checking and similar. This supplements the already built-in malloc and calloc constant size handling. * Integer constants written in binary are now supported as a GCC extension. They consist of a prefix 0b or 0B, followed by a sequence of 0 and 1 digits. * A new predefined macro __COUNTER__ has been added. It expands to sequential integral values starting from 0. In conjunction with the ## operator, this provides a convenient means to generate unique identifiers. * A new command-line option -fdirectives-only has been added. It enables a special preprocessing mode which improves the performance of applications like distcc and ccache. * Fixed-point data types and operators have been added. They are based on Chapter 4 of the Embedded-C specification (n1169.pdf). Currently, only MIPS targets are supported. * Decimal floating-point arithmetic based on draft ISO/IEC TR 24732, N1241, is now supported as a GCC extension to C for targets i[34567]86-*-linux-gnu, powerpc*-*-linux-gnu, s390*-ibm-linux-gnu, and x86_64-*-linux-gnu. The feature introduces new data types _Decimal32, _Decimal64, and _Decimal128 with constant suffixes DF, DD, and DL. C++ * [12]Experimental support for the upcoming ISO C++ standard, C++0x. * -Wc++0x-compat has been added and is now enabled by default for -Wall. It produces warnings for constructs whose meaning differs between ISO C++ 1998 and C++0x. * The -Wparentheses option now works for C++ as it does for C. It warns if parentheses are omitted when operators with confusing precedence are nested. It also warns about ambiguous else statements. Since -Wparentheses is enabled by -Wall, this may cause additional warnings with existing C++ code which uses -Wall. These new warnings may be disabled by using -Wall -Wno-parentheses. * The -Wmissing-declarations now works for C++ as it does for C. * The -fvisibility-ms-compat flag was added, to make it easier to port larger projects using shared libraries from Microsoft's Visual Studio to ELF and Mach-O systems. * C++ attribute handling has been overhauled for template arguments (ie dependent types). In particular, __attribute__((aligned(T))); works for C++ types. Runtime Library (libstdc++) * [13]Experimental support for the upcoming ISO C++ standard, C++0x. * Support for TR1 mathematical special functions and regular expressions. ([14]Implementation status of TR1) * Default what implementations give more elaborate exception strings for bad_cast, bad_typeid, bad_exception, and bad_alloc. * Header dependencies have been streamlined, reducing unnecessary includes and pre-processed bloat. * Variadic template implementations of items in and . * An experimental [15]parallel mode has been added. This is a parallel implementation of many C++ Standard library algorithms, like std::accumulate, std::for_each, std::transform, or std::sort, to give but four examples. These algorithms can be substituted for the normal (sequential) libstdc++ algorithms on a piecemeal basis, or all existing algorithms can be transformed via the -D_GLIBCXX_PARALLEL macro. * Debug mode versions of classes in and . * Formal deprecation of and , which are now and . This code: #include __gnu_cxx::hash_set s; Can be transformed (in order of preference) to: #include std::tr1::unordered_set s; or #include __gnu_cxx::hash_set s; Similar transformations apply to __gnu_cxx::hash_map, __gnu_cxx::hash_multimap, __gnu_cxx::hash_set, __gnu_cxx::hash_multiset. Fortran * Due to the fact that the [16]GMP and [17]MPFR libraries are required for all languages, Fortran is no longer special in this regard and is available by default. * The [18]-fexternal-blas option has been added, which generates calls to BLAS routines for intrinsic matrix operations such as matmul rather than using the built-in algorithms. * Support to give a backtrace (compiler flag -fbacktrace or environment variable GFORTRAN_ERROR_BACKTRACE; on glibc systems only) or a core dump (-fdump-core, GFORTRAN_ERROR_DUMPCORE) when a run-time error occured. * GNU Fortran now defines __GFORTRAN__ when it runs the C preprocessor (CPP). * The [19]-finit-local-zero, -finit-real, -finit-integer, -finit-character, and -finit-logical options have been added, which can be used to initialize local variables. * The intrinsic procedures [20]GAMMA and [21]LGAMMA have been added, which calculate the Gamma function and its logarithm. Use EXTERNAL gamma if you want to use your own gamma function. * GNU Fortran now regards the backslash character as literal (as required by the Fortran 2003 standard); using [22]-fbackslash GNU Fortran interprets backslashes as C-style escape characters. * The [23]interpretation of binary, octal and hexadecimal (BOZ) literal constants has been changed. Before they were always interpreted as integer; now they are bit-wise transferred as argument of INT, REAL, DBLE and CMPLX as required by the Fortran 2003 standard, and for real and complex variables in DATA statements or when directly assigned to real and complex variables. Everywhere else and especially in expressions they are still regarded as integer constants. * Fortran 2003 support has been extended: + Intrinsic statements IMPORT, PROTECTED, VALUE and VOLATILE + Pointer intent + Intrinsic module ISO_ENV_FORTRAN + Interoperability with C (ISO C Bindings) + ABSTRACT INTERFACES and PROCEDURE statements (without POINTER attribute) + Fortran 2003 BOZ Java (GCJ) * GCJ now uses the Eclipse Java compiler for its Java parsing needs. This enables the use of all 1.5 language features, and fixes most existing front end bugs. * libgcj now supports all 1.5 language features which require runtime support: foreach, enum, annotations, generics, and auto-boxing. * We've made many changes to the tools shipped with gcj. + The old jv-scan tool has been removed. This tool never really worked properly. There is no replacement. + gcjh has been rewritten. Some of its more obscure options no longer work, but are still recognized in an attempt at compatibility. gjavah is a new program with similar functionality but different command-line options. + grmic and grmiregistry have been rewritten. grmid has been added. + gjar replaces the old fastjar. + gjarsigner (used for signing jars), gkeytool (used for key management), gorbd (for CORBA), gserialver (computes serialization UIDs), and gtnameserv (also for CORBA) are now installed. * The ability to dump the contents of the java run time heap to a file for off-line analysis has been added. The heap dumps may be analyzed with the new gc-analyze tool. They may be generated on out-of-memory conditions or on demand and are controlled by the new run time class gnu.gcj.util.GCInfo. * java.util.TimeZone can now read files from /usr/share/zoneinfo to provide correct, updated, timezone information. This means that packagers no longer have to update libgcj when a time zone change is published. New Targets and Target Specific Improvements IA-32/x86-64 * Tuning for Intel Core 2 processors is available via -mtune=core2 and -march=core2. * Tuning for AMD Geode processors is available via -mtune=geode and -march=geode. * Code generation of block move (memcpy) and block set (memset) was rewritten. GCC can now pick the best algorithm (loop, unrolled loop, instruction with rep prefix or a library call) based on the size of the block being copied and the CPU being optimized for. A new option -minline-stringops-dynamically has been added. With this option string operations of unknown size are expanded such that small blocks are copied by in-line code, while for large blocks a library call is used. This results in faster code than -minline-all-stringops when the library implementation is capable of using cache hierarchy hints. The heuristic choosing the particular algorithm can be overwritten via -mstringop-strategy. Newly also memset of values different from 0 is inlined. * GCC no longer places the cld instruction before string operations. Both i386 and x86-64 ABI documents mandate the direction flag to be clear at the entry of a function. It is now invalid to set the flag in asm statement without reseting it afterward. * Support for SSSE3 built-in functions and code generation are available via -mssse3. * Support for SSE4.1 built-in functions and code generation are available via -msse4.1. * Support for SSE4.2 built-in functions and code generation are available via -msse4.2. * Both SSE4.1 and SSE4.2 support can be enabled via -msse4. * A new set of options -mpc32, -mpc64 and -mpc80 have been added to allow explicit control of x87 floating point precision. * Support for __float128 (TFmode) IEEE quad type and corresponding TCmode IEEE complex quad type is available via the soft-fp library on x86_64 targets. This includes basic arithmetic operations (addition, subtraction, negation, multiplication and division) on __float128 real and TCmode complex values, the full set of IEEE comparisons between __float128 values, conversions to and from float, double and long double floating point types, as well as conversions to and from signed or unsigned integer, signed or unsigned long integer and signed or unsigned quad (TImode) integer types. Additionally, all operations generate the full set of IEEE exceptions and support the full set of IEEE rounding modes. * GCC can now utilize the ACML library for vectorizing calls to a set of C99 functions on x86_64 if -mveclibabi=acml is specified and you link to an ACML ABI compatible library. ARM * Compiler and Library support for Thumb-2 and the ARMv7 architecture has been added. CRIS New features * Compiler and Library support for the CRIS v32 architecture, as found in Axis Communications ETRAX FS and ARTPEC-3 chips, has been added. Configuration changes * The cris-*-elf target now includes support for CRIS v32, including libraries, through the -march=v32 option. * A new crisv32-*-elf target defaults to generate code for CRIS v32. * A new crisv32-*-linux* target defaults to generate code for CRIS v32. * The cris-*-aout target has been obsoleted. Improved support for built-in functions * GCC can now use the lz and swapwbr instructions to implement the __builtin_clz, __builtin_ctz and __builtin_ffs family of functions. * __builtin_bswap32 is now implemented using the swapwb instruction, when available. m68k and ColdFire New features * Support for several new ColdFire processors has been added. You can generate code for them using the new -mcpu option. * All targets now support ColdFire processors. * m68k-uclinux targets have improved support for C++ constructors and destructors, and for shared libraries. * It is now possible to set breakpoints on the first or last line of a function, even if there are no statements on that line. Optimizations * Support for sibling calls has been added. * More use is now made of the ColdFire mov3q instruction. * __builtin_clz is now implemented using the ff1 ColdFire instruction, when available. * GCC now honors the -m68010 option. 68010 code now uses clr rather than move to zero volatile memory. * 68020 targets and above can now use symbol(index.size*scale) addresses for indexed array accesses. Earlier compilers would always load the symbol into a base register first. Configuration changes * All m68k and ColdFire targets now allow the default processor to be set at configure time using --with-cpu. * A --with-arch configuration option has been added. This option allows you to restrict a target to ColdFire or non-ColdFire processors. Preprocessor macros * An __mcfv*__ macro is now defined for all ColdFire targets. (Earlier versions of GCC only defined __mcfv4e__.) * __mcf_cpu_*, __mcf_family_* and __mcffpu__ macros have been added. * All targets now define __mc68010 and __mc68010__ when generating 68010 code. Command-line changes * New command-line options -march, -mcpu, -mtune and -mhard-float have been added. These options apply to both m68k and ColdFire targets. * -mno-short, -mno-bitfield and -mno-rtd are now accepted as negative versions of -mshort, etc. * -fforce-addr has been removed. It is now ignored by the compiler. Other improvements * ColdFire targets now try to maintain a 4-byte-aligned stack where possible. * m68k-uclinux targets now try to avoid situations that lead to the load-time error: BINFMT_FLAT: reloc outside program. MIPS Changes to existing configurations * libffi and libjava now support all three GNU/Linux ABIs: o32, n32 and n64. Every GNU/Linux configuration now builds these libraries by default. * GNU/Linux configurations now generate -mno-shared code unless overridden by -fpic, -fPIC, -fpie or -fPIE. * mipsisa32*-linux-gnu configurations now generate hard-float code by default, just like other mipsisa32* and mips*-linux-gnu configurations. You can build a soft-float version of any mips*-linux-gnu configuration by passing --with-float=soft to configure. * mips-wrs-vxworks now supports run-time processes (RTPs). Changes to existing command-line options * The -march and -mtune options no longer accept 24k as a processor name. Please use 24kc, 24kf2_1 or 24kf1_1 instead. * The -march and -mtune options now accept 24kf2_1, 24kef2_1 and 34kf2_1 as synonyms for 24kf, 24kef and 34kf respectively. The options also accept 24kf1_1, 24kef1_1 and 34kf1_1 as synonyms for 24kx, 24kex and 34kx. New configurations GCC now supports the following configurations: * mipsisa32r2*-linux-gnu*, which generates MIPS32 revision 2 code by default. Earlier releases also recognized this configuration, but they treated it in the same way as mipsisa32*-linux-gnu*. Note that you can customize any mips*-linux-gnu* configuration to a particular ISA or processor by passing an appropriate --with-arch option to configure. * mipsisa*-sde-elf*, which provides compatibility with MIPS Technologies' SDE toolchains. The configuration uses the SDE libraries by default, but you can use it like other newlib-based ELF configurations by passing --with-newlib to configure. It is the only configuration besides mips64vr*-elf* to build MIPS16 as well as non-MIPS16 libraries. * mipsisa*-elfoabi*, which is similar to the general mipsisa*-elf* configuration, but uses the o32 and o64 ABIs instead of the 32-bit and 64-bit forms of the EABI. New processors and application-specific extensions * Support for the SmartMIPS ASE is available through the new -msmartmips option. * Support for revision 2 of the DSP ASE is available through the new -mdspr2 option. A new preprocessor macro called __mips_dsp_rev indicates the revision of the ASE in use. * Support for the 4KS and 74K families of processors is available through the -march and -mtune options. Improved support for built-in functions * GCC can now use load-linked, store-conditional and sync instructions to implement atomic built-in functions such as __sync_fetch_and_add. The memory reference must be 4 bytes wide for 32-bit targets and either 4 or 8 bytes wide for 64-bit targets. * GCC can now use the clz and dclz instructions to implement the __builtin_ctz and __builtin_ffs families of functions. * There is a new __builtin___clear_cache function for flushing the instruction cache. GCC expands this function inline on MIPS32 revision 2 targets, otherwise it calls the function specified by -mcache-flush-func. MIPS16 improvements * GCC can now compile objects that contain a mixture of MIPS16 and non-MIPS16 code. There are two new attributes, mips16 and nomips16, for specifying which mode a function should use. * A new option called -minterlink-mips16 makes non-MIPS16 code link-compatible with MIPS16 code. * After many bug fixes, the long-standing MIPS16 -mhard-float support should now work fairly reliably. * GCC can now use the MIPS16e save and restore instructions. * -fsection-anchors now works in MIPS16 mode. MIPS16 code compiled with -G0 -fsection-anchors is often smaller than code compiled with -G8. However, please note that you must usually compile all objects in your application with the same -G option; see the documentation of -G for details. * A new option called-mcode-readable specifies which instructions are allowed to load from the code segment. -mcode-readable=yes is the default and says that any instruction may load from the code segment. The other alternatives are -mcode-readable=pcrel, which says that only PC-relative MIPS16 instructions may load from the code segment, and -mcode-readable=no, which says that no instruction may do so. Please see the documentation for more details, including example uses. Small-data improvements There are three new options for controlling small data: * -mno-extern-sdata, which disables small-data accesses for externally-defined variables. Code compiled with -Gn -mno-extern-sdata will be link-compatible with any -G setting between -G0 and -Gn inclusive. * -mno-local-sdata, which disables the use of small-data sections for data that is not externally visible. This option can be a useful way of reducing small-data usage in less performance-critical parts of an application. * -mno-gpopt, which disables the use of the $gp register while still honoring the -G limit when placing externally-visible data. This option implies -mno-extern-sdata and -mno-local-sdata and it can be useful in situations where $gp does not necessarily hold the expected value. Miscellaneous improvements * There is a new option called -mbranch-cost for tweaking the perceived cost of branches. * If GCC is configured to use a version of GAS that supports the .gnu_attribute directive, it will use that directive to record certain properties of the output code. .gnu_attribute is new to GAS 2.18. * There are two new function attributes, near and far, for overriding the command-line setting of -mlong-calls on a function-by-function basis. * -mfp64, which previously required a 64-bit target, now works with MIPS32 revision 2 targets as well. The mipsisa*-elfoabi* and mipsisa*-sde-elf* configurations provide suitable library support. * GCC now recognizes the -mdmx and -mmt options and passes them down to the assembler. It does nothing else with the options at present. SPU (Synergistic Processor Unit) of the Cell Broadband Engine Architecture (BEA) * Support has been added for this new architecture. RS6000 (POWER/PowerPC) * Support for the PowerPC 750CL paired-single instructions has been added with a new powerpc-*-linux*paired* target configuration. It is enabled by an associated -mpaired option and can be accessed using new built-in functions. * Support for auto-detecting architecture and system configuration to auto-select processor optimization tuning. * Support for VMX on AIX 5.3 has been added. * Support for AIX Version 6.1 has been added. S/390, zSeries and System z9 * Support for the IBM System z9 EC/BC processor (z9 GA3) has been added. When using the -march=z9-ec option, the compiler will generate code making use of instructions provided by the decimal floating point facility and the floating point conversion facility (pfpo). Besides the instructions used to implement decimal floating point operations these facilities also contain instructions to move between general purpose and floating point registers and to modify and copy the sign-bit of floating point values. * When the -march=z9-ec option is used the new -mhard-dfp/-mno-hard-dfp options can be used to specify whether the decimal floating point hardware instructions will be used or not. If none of them is given the hardware support is enabled by default. * The -mstack-guard option can now be omitted when using stack checking via -mstack-size in order to let GCC choose a sensible stack guard value according to the frame size of each function. * Various changes to improve performance of generated code have been implemented, including: + The condition code set by an add logical with carry instruction is now available for overflow checks like: a + b + carry < b. + The test data class instruction is now used to implement sign-bit and infinity checks of binary and decimal floating point numbers. SPARC * Support for the Sun UltraSPARC T2 (Niagara 2) processor has been added. Xtensa * Stack unwinding for exception handling now uses by default a specialized version of DWARF unwinding. This is not binary-compatible with the setjmp/longjmp (sjlj) unwinding used for Xtensa with previous versions of GCC. * For Xtensa processors that include the Conditional Store option, the built-in functions for atomic memory access are now implemented using S32C1I instructions. * If the Xtensa NSA option is available, GCC will use it to implement the __builtin_ctz and __builtin_clz functions. Documentation improvements * Existing libstdc++ documentation has been edited and restructured into a single DocBook XML manual. The results can be viewed online [24]here. Other significant improvements * The compiler's --help command-line option has been extended so that it now takes an optional set of arguments. These arguments restrict the information displayed to specific classes of command-line options, and possibly only a subset of those options. It is also now possible to replace the descriptive text associated with each displayed option with an indication of its current value, or for binary options, whether it has been enabled or disabled. Here are some examples. The following will display all the options controlling warning messages: --help=warnings Whereas this will display all the undocumented, target specific options: --help=target,undocumented This sequence of commands will display the binary optimizations that are enabled by -O3: gcc -c -Q -O3 --help=optimizers > /tmp/O3-opts gcc -c -Q -O2 --help=optimizers > /tmp/O2-opts diff /tmp/O2-opts /tmp/O3-opts | grep enabled * The configure options --with-pkgversion and --with-bugurl have been added. These allow distributors of GCC to include a distributor-specific string in manuals and --version output and to specify the URL for reporting bugs in their versions of GCC. GCC 4.3.1 This is the [25]list of problem reports (PRs) from GCC's bug tracking system that are known to be fixed in the 4.3.1 release. This list might not be complete (that is, it is possible that some PRs that have been fixed are not listed here). Target Specific Changes IA-32/x86-64 ABI changes * Starting with GCC 4.3.1, decimal floating point variables are aligned to their natural boundaries when they are passed on the stack for i386. Command-line changes * Starting with GCC 4.3.1, the -mcld option has been added to automatically generate a cld instruction in the prologue of functions that use string instructions. This option is used for backward compatibility on some operating systems and can be enabled by default for 32-bit x86 targets by configuring GCC with the --enable-cld configure option. GCC 4.3.2 This is the [26]list of problem reports (PRs) from GCC's bug tracking system that are known to be fixed in the 4.3.2 release. This list might not be complete (that is, it is possible that some PRs that have been fixed are not listed here). GCC 4.3.3 This is the [27]list of problem reports (PRs) from GCC's bug tracking system that are known to be fixed in the 4.3.3 release. This list might not be complete (that is, it is possible that some PRs that have been fixed are not listed here). GCC 4.3.4 This is the [28]list of problem reports (PRs) from GCC's bug tracking system that are known to be fixed in the 4.3.4 release. This list might not be complete (that is, it is possible that some PRs that have been fixed are not listed here). GCC 4.3.5 This is the [29]list of problem reports (PRs) from GCC's bug tracking system that are known to be fixed in the 4.3.5 release. This list might not be complete (that is, it is possible that some PRs that have been fixed are not listed here). GCC 4.3.6 This is the [30]list of problem reports (PRs) from GCC's bug tracking system that are known to be fixed in the 4.3.6 release. This list might not be complete (that is, it is possible that some PRs that have been fixed are not listed here). For questions related to the use of GCC, please consult these web pages and the [31]GCC manuals. If that fails, the [32]gcc-help@gcc.gnu.org mailing list might help. Comments on these web pages and the development of GCC are welcome on our developer list at [33]gcc@gcc.gnu.org. All of [34]our lists have public archives. Copyright (C) [35]Free Software Foundation, Inc. Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium, provided this notice is preserved. These pages are [36]maintained by the GCC team. Last modified 2011-09-12[37]. References 1. http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.3/changes.html#4.3.5 2. http://gmplib.org/ 3. http://www.mpfr.org/ 4. http://gcc.gnu.org/install/prerequisites.html 5. http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-announce/2001/msg00000.html 6. http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Warning-Options.html#Warning-Options 7. http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.3/porting_to.html 8. http://www.mpfr.org/ 9. http://www.mpfr.org/ 10. http://www.mpfr.org/ 11. http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Warning-Options.html 12. http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.3/cxx0x_status.html 13. http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.3/cxx0x_status.html 14. http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/libstdc++/manual/bk01pt01ch01.html#m anual.intro.status.standard.tr1 15. http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/libstdc++/manual/parallel_mode.html 16. http://gmplib.org/ 17. http://www.mpfr.org/ 18. http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gfortran/Code-Gen-Options.html#Code-Gen-Options 19. http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gfortran/Code-Gen-Options.html#index-g_t_0040code_007bfinit-local-zero_007d-167 20. http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-4.3.0/gfortran/GAMMA.html 21. http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-4.3.0/gfortran/LGAMMA.html 22. http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gfortran/Fortran-Dialect-Options.html 23. http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gfortran/BOZ-literal-constants.html 24. http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/libstdc++/ 25. http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/buglist.cgi?bug_status=RESOLVED&resolution=FIXED&target_milestone=4.3.1 26. http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/buglist.cgi?bug_status=RESOLVED&resolution=FIXED&target_milestone=4.3.2 27. http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/buglist.cgi?bug_status=RESOLVED&resolution=FIXED&target_milestone=4.3.3 28. http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/buglist.cgi?bug_status=RESOLVED&resolution=FIXED&target_milestone=4.3.4 29. http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/buglist.cgi?bug_status=RESOLVED&resolution=FIXED&target_milestone=4.3.5 30. http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/buglist.cgi?bug_status=RESOLVED&resolution=FIXED&target_milestone=4.3.6 31. http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/ 32. mailto:gcc-help@gcc.gnu.org 33. mailto:gcc@gcc.gnu.org 34. http://gcc.gnu.org/lists.html 35. http://www.fsf.org/ 36. http://gcc.gnu.org/about.html 37. http://validator.w3.org/check/referer ====================================================================== http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.2/index.html GCC 4.2 Release Series May 19, 2008 The [1]GNU project and the GCC developers are pleased to announce the release of GCC 4.2.4. This release is a bug-fix release, containing fixes for regressions in GCC 4.2.3 relative to previous releases of GCC. Release History GCC 4.2.4 May 19, 2008 ([2]changes) GCC 4.2.3 February 1, 2008 ([3]changes) GCC 4.2.2 October 7, 2007 ([4]changes) GCC 4.2.1 July 18, 2007 ([5]changes) GCC 4.2.0 May 13, 2007 ([6]changes) References and Acknowledgements GCC used to stand for the GNU C Compiler, but since the compiler supports several other languages aside from C, it now stands for the GNU Compiler Collection. A list of [7]successful builds is updated as new information becomes available. The GCC developers would like to thank the numerous people that have contributed new features, improvements, bug fixes, and other changes as well as test results to GCC. This [8]amazing group of volunteers is what makes GCC successful. For additional information about GCC please refer to the [9]GCC project web site or contact the [10]GCC development mailing list. To obtain GCC please use [11]our mirror sites or [12]our SVN server. For questions related to the use of GCC, please consult these web pages and the [13]GCC manuals. If that fails, the [14]gcc-help@gcc.gnu.org mailing list might help. Comments on these web pages and the development of GCC are welcome on our developer list at [15]gcc@gcc.gnu.org. All of [16]our lists have public archives. Copyright (C) [17]Free Software Foundation, Inc. Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium, provided this notice is preserved. These pages are [18]maintained by the GCC team. Last modified 2011-04-25[19]. References 1. http://www.gnu.org/ 2. http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.2/changes.html 3. http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.2/changes.html 4. http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.2/changes.html 5. http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.2/changes.html 6. http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.2/changes.html 7. http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.2/buildstat.html 8. http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Contributors.html 9. http://gcc.gnu.org/index.html 10. mailto:gcc@gcc.gnu.org 11. http://gcc.gnu.org/mirrors.html 12. http://gcc.gnu.org/svn.html 13. http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/ 14. mailto:gcc-help@gcc.gnu.org 15. mailto:gcc@gcc.gnu.org 16. http://gcc.gnu.org/lists.html 17. http://www.fsf.org/ 18. http://gcc.gnu.org/about.html 19. http://validator.w3.org/check/referer ====================================================================== http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.2/changes.html GCC 4.2 Release Series Changes, New Features, and Fixes Caveats * GCC no longer accepts the -fshared-data option. This option has had no effect in any GCC 4 release; the targets to which the option used to apply had been removed before GCC 4.0. General Optimizer Improvements * New command-line options specify the possible relationships among parameters and between parameters and global data. For example, -fargument-noalias-anything specifies that arguments do not alias any other storage. Each language will automatically use whatever option is required by the language standard. You should not need to use these options yourself. New Languages and Language specific improvements * [1]OpenMP is now supported for the C, C++ and Fortran compilers. * New command-line options -fstrict-overflow and -Wstrict-overflow have been added. -fstrict-overflow tells the compiler that it may assume that the program follows the strict signed overflow semantics permitted for the language: for C and C++ this means that the compiler may assume that signed overflow does not occur. For example, a loop like for (i = 1; i > 0; i *= 2) is presumably intended to continue looping until i overflows. With -fstrict-overflow, the compiler may assume that signed overflow will not occur, and transform this into an infinite loop. -fstrict-overflow is turned on by default at -O2, and may be disabled via -fno-strict-overflow. The -Wstrict-overflow option may be used to warn about cases where the compiler assumes that signed overflow will not occur. It takes five different levels: -Wstrict-overflow=1 to 5. See the [2]documentation for details. -Wstrict-overflow=1 is enabled by -Wall. * The new command-line option -fno-toplevel-reorder directs GCC to emit top-level functions, variables, and asm statements in the same order that they appear in the input file. This is intended to support existing code which relies on a particular ordering (for example, code which uses top-level asm statements to switch sections). For new code, it is generally better to use function and variable attributes. The -fno-toplevel-reorder option may be used for most cases which currently use -fno-unit-at-a-time. The -fno-unit-at-a-time option will be removed in some future version of GCC. If you know of a case which requires -fno-unit-at-a-time which is not fixed by -fno-toplevel-reorder, please open a bug report. C family * The pragma redefine_extname will now macro expand its tokens for compatibility with SunPRO. * In the next release of GCC, 4.3, -std=c99 or -std=gnu99 will direct GCC to handle inline functions as specified in the C99 standard. In preparation for this, GCC 4.2 will warn about any use of non-static inline functions in gnu99 or c99 mode. This new warning may be disabled with the new gnu_inline function attribute or the new -fgnu89-inline command-line option. Also, GCC 4.2 and later will define one of the preprocessor macros __GNUC_GNU_INLINE__ or __GNUC_STDC_INLINE__ to indicate the semantics of inline functions in the current compilation. * A new command-line option -Waddress has been added to warn about suspicious uses of memory addresses as, for example, using the address of a function in a conditional expression, and comparisons against the memory address of a string literal. This warning is enabled by -Wall. C++ * C++ visibility handling has been overhauled. Restricted visiblity is propagated from classes to members, from functions to local statics, and from templates and template arguments to instantiations, unless the latter has explicitly declared visibility. The visibility attribute for a class must come between the class-key and the name, not after the closing brace. Attributes are now allowed for enums and elaborated-type-specifiers that only declare a type. Members of the anonymous namespace are now local to a particular translation unit, along with any other declarations which use them, though they are still treated as having external linkage for language semantics. * The (undocumented) extension which permitted templates with default arguments to be bound to template template parameters with fewer parameters has been removed. For example: template