GCC 11 Will Be Set In Stone On November 15th

Developer Richard Biener has announced that next major version of the GNU Compiler Collection will enter a feature-freeze on November 15th. There's currently a total of 572 regressions in GCC 11 that need to be fixed before the final version is released April/May 2021.

written by 林慧 (Wai Lin) 2020-10-16 - last edited 2020-10-16. © CC BY

GCC 10.2.1.

The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) is the corner-stone of most GNU/Linux distributions. It can compile C, C++ and many other programming languages which is why the original "GNU C Compiler" name was changed. The development cycle is pretty long compared to some other software projects due to how widely used it is.

GCC developer Richard Biener announced that "general development" of GCC 11 will end on November 15th in a message on the GCC mailing list today. Any new features need to be in by then or they'll have to wait for GCC 12.

There's currently 572 regressions in GCC 11. 33 of them are "priority 1" and 256 are "priority 2". These are bugs that need to be fixed before a final release.

The biggest highlight in GCC 11 will be C++17 as the default C++ dialect and additional C++20 capabilities. C++ may not be as beautiful as C, but it does work for many major software projects.

File: hello.cpp

#include <stdio.h>
int main() 
{
  printf("Hello World!!\n");
  return 0;
}

gcc hello.cpp  -o hello

The long bug-fixing cycle following GCC's feature-freeze is typical five to six months long. That places the final GCC 11 release around April/May 2021.

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