GCC 5 Will Have Full Support For Intel's Cilk Plus

While GCC has had Cilk Plus multi-threading support since last year that made it into GCC 4.9, with the upcoming GCC 5 release will be full support for Intel's Cilk Plus specification.

GCC's C and C++ front-ends will have full Cilk Plus support for task and data parallelism. Cilk Plus is similar in concept to OpenMP with being a C/C++ programming language extension that adds multi-threaded parallel computing support. Cilk Plus provides the cilk_for, cilk_spawn, and cilk_sync programming keywords for simple yet effective parallel programming.

A big Cilk Plus update landed in GCC last week for what's going to be called GCC 5 (formerly GCC 4.10) and now the release notes cite full Cilk Plus support as being a feature of this compiler update due out in 2015. GCC 5 also features DragonFlyBSD support and other changes.

A few days ago Intel also updated its Cilk Plus LLVM compiler.