GCC 4.9.0 compilers with a lot of new "chips"

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

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

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

Significantly improved the quality of optimization in linking (link-time optimization, LTO), as well as improved some other optimization algorithms, including interprocedural optimization and optimization with feedback (feedback-directed optimization). For example, thanks to LTO, the memory usage when compiling Firefox has decreased from 15 GB to 3.5 GB, and the execution time of this procedure from 1700 to 350 seconds.
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GCC 4.9.0 diagnostic tools now work in color , highlighting error markers, warnings, etc.

Improved support for the C programming language in the ISO C11 standard, as well as significant work on preliminary support for C ++ 1y (C ++ 14), support for Google Go 1.2.1.

Support for ARM processors has come a long way, including a new local memory register allocator for the AArch64, optimization for the Cortex-A53 and Cortex-A57 and big.LITTLE architecture, as well as other improvements.

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

Added support for IBM Power8 processors.

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