GCC 4.9 Is Now In Bug-Fixes-Only Stage 3 Mode

GCC 4.9 with its many new features is aiming for a release in the first half of 2014. As of this morning the GCC code-base will not accept new features as it's under a big-fixing-only flag.

Richard Biener announced this morning that trunk is now in stage three, so that after eight months of allowing features into GCC for the 4.9 release, nothing new will be permitted unless an exception is granted by the release managers. Stage 3 allows for general bug-fixing work to be completed while in about two months it will go into the Stage 4 mode of only allowing documentation and regression fixes.

At the moment there are 63 P1 regressions (the most severe regression) for GCC 4.9 followed by 136 P2 regressions, 14 P3 regressions, 88 P4 regressions, and 60 P5 regressions. Not until the 63 regressions of the P1 state have been zeroed out will GCC 4.9 move closer to being released. The GCC 4.9.0 release will likely come some time around Q2'2014.

This morning's GCC 4.9.0 status report can be found on the GCC mailing list. GCC 4.9 will be a very nice compiler update and competition to next month's release of LLVM 3.4.