GCC's JIT Library Is Still Working Out Speed Improvements

Present in GCC 5.x is libgccjit, an embeddable Just-In-Time compiler for the GNU Compiler Collection. While it's still largely experimental and I haven't heard of any projects really utilizing it in a production setting yet, more performance improvements are ahead.

David Malcolm at Red Hat who has been spearheading the libgccjit support since starting the project around two years ago has published some new patches today. Back in June he posted some patches that could make the GCC JIT compiler about five times faster while today's work is a prerequisite and partial follow-up to those original patches.

David posted two revised patches today that provide a "modest speedup" by embedding the driver within libgccjit. The numbers shared in the new patch series aren't too jaw-dropping, but this code needs to land in trunk prior to landing his more impressive work. He's hoping these first two patches can now be approved for landing into GCC trunk.

These latest GCC Just-In-Time compiler improvements are present for GCC 6 that is due out next year.