To begin with, GNU will be a kernel plus all the utilities needed to
write and run C programs: editor, shell, C compiler, linker,
assembler, and a few other things. After this we will add a text
formatter, a YACC, an Empire game, a spreadsheet, and hundreds of
other things. We hope to supply, eventually, everything useful that
normally comes with a Unix system, and anything else useful,
including on-line and hardcopy documentation.
Today we celebrate twenty-five years of GNU and the GNU Compiler
Collection with an announcement by the GCC release managers:
When Richard Stallman announced the first public release of GCC in
1987, few could have imagined the broad impact that it has had. It
has prototyped many language features that later were adopted as
part of their respective standards -- everything from "long long"
type to transactional memory. It deployed an architecture-neutral
automatic vectorization facility, OpenMP, and Polyhedral loop nest
optimization. It has provided the toolchain infrastructure for the
GNU/Linux ecosystem used everywhere from Google and Facebook to
financial markets and stock exchanges. We salute and thank the
hundreds of developers who have contributed over the years to make
GCC one of the most long-lasting and successful free software
projects in the history of this industry.
As a special present we have prepared the release of GCC 4.7.0 which
continues the series of free software high-quality industry-standard
compilers.
GCC 4.7.0 is a major release, containing substantial new
functionality not available in GCC 4.6.x or previous GCC releases.
GCC 4.7 features support for software transactional memory on
selected architectures. The C++ compiler supports a bigger subset
of the new ISO C++11 standard such as support for atomics and the
C++11 memory model, non-static data member initializers,
user-defined literals, alias-declarations, delegating constructors,
explicit override and extended friend syntax. The C compiler adds
support for more features from the new ISO C11 standard. GCC now
supports version 3.1 of the OpenMP specification for C, C++ and
Fortran.
The link-time optimization (LTO) framework has seen improvements
with regards to scalability, stability and resource needs. Inlining
and interprocedural constant propagation have been improved.
GCC 4.7 now supports various new GNU extensions to the DWARF
debugging information format, like entry value and call site
information, a typed DWARF stack and a more compact macro
representation.
Extending the widest support for hardware architectures in the
industry, GCC 4.7 gains support for Adapteva's Epiphany processor,
National Semiconductor's CR16, and TI's C6X as well as Tilera's
TILE-Gx and TILEPro families of processors. The x86 family support
has been extended by the Intel Haswell and AMD Piledriver
architectures. ARM has gained support for the Cortex-A7 family.
