GCC 5 Feature Development Is Over With A Focus Now On Bug-Fixing

GCC 5.0 feature development is now over so it's time to start concentrating on fixing bugs for this huge compiler update.

GCC 5 has a plethora of features as the major 2015 compiler update for this GPL-licensed compiler. Many of the features have already been outlined in dozens of Phoronix articles over the past year. However, as of yesterday, feature development is over. Coming up in another Phoronix article soon will be a recap of the big features for GCC 5, which is a hugely promising compiler update and has been super excited for its release.

Jakub Jelinek of Red Hat announced that GCC trunk is in stage three -- meaning that it's open for developers to commit general bug-fixes. However, at the end of 16 January is when the code will enter stage four. When in stage four development, the GNU Compiler Collection will only permit fixes for wrong-code generation, regression fixes, and documentation fixes.

Per Jakub's message there are about 39 P1 bug-fixes, 98 P2 bug-fixes, and 48 P3 bug-fixes. The high priority bug-fixes need to be addressed before GCC 5 can be officially released, which given past development cycles will likely be taken care of and GCC 5 officially released around the March~April time-frame. GCC 5 will be going head-to-head with LLVM/Clang 3.6.