Debian Will Soon Make GCC 5 Its Default Compiler

Written by Michael Larabel in Debian on 7 July 2015 at 12:58 PM EDT. 7 Comments
DEBIAN
Plans have been laid for making GCC 5 the default compiler in Debian Unstable by month's end. With the move to GCC5 comes libstdc++6 ABI breakage.

GCC 5 is a huge compiler update and offers a ton of new features/functionality but for a distribution moving to it comes some ABI incompatibilities in the libstdc++6 standard library. There is also potential package breaks due to defaulting to C++11 as the default C++ language version.

Matthias Klose of Debian is hoping to do the GCC version bump on 31 July but is hoping Debian developers will fix any package issues and problems ahead of time. He's also already preemptively warned developers to test their C++14 package support given that GCC 6 will default to this latest C++ revision. The next major release of Debian, 9.0 Stretch, will end up using GCC6 given that "Stretch" will come after next year's release of GCC 6.1.

Those wishing to find out more about Debian's GCC5 and libstdc++6 plans can read this mailing list post.
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