GCC 4.9.4 Will Be Released Soon To End GCC 4.9 Series

[phoronix]

Phoronix: GCC 4.9.4 Will Be Released Soon To End GCC 4.9 Series

With GCC 6.2 coming soon and GCC 5 already being quite mature, GNU Compiler Collection developers are intending to soon end maintenance on GCC 4.x...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GCC-4.9.4-Coming

[AndyChow]

The release cycle of versions seems greatly accelerated:

1.0	May 23, 1987

2.0	February 22, 1992

GCC 3.0

June 18, 2001

GCC 4.0.1

July 7, 2005

GCC 5.1

April 22, 2015

GCC 6.1

April 27, 2016

And now, a GCC 7 in 2017? I wonder if it's mostly a branding strategy, rather than a logical version numbering scheme.

[davidlt]

Versioning scheme was been changed starting GCC 5. They cook a release every ~12 month.

[Guest]

They discovered that the criteria that governs the decision between 1.0.x->1.1.x and 1.0.x->2.0.x doesn't always exist.