GCC 15 Compiler Development Shifts From Features To Bug Fixing

GCC 15 feature development is now officially over with entering stage three development to focus on fixing compiler bugs.

As expected, GCC 15 stage one development ended today with the announcement by SUSE compiler engineer Richard Biener. GCC 15 is now onto stage three development that is focused on general bug fixing.

Stage 3 is typically a two-month period where changes allowed are bug fixes or new ports. New functionality isn't supposed to be introduced during this period. After two months it's then stage four development where only regression fixes are typically allowed. This is the last stage of GNU Compiler Collection development until the release ships.

If usual traditions hold, GCC 15.1 as the first stable GCC 15 compiler release should be out in March~April.

In today's announcement of shifting GC 15 to stage three development, Richard Biener noted there are 26 P1 regressions of the highest priority followed by 636 P2 regressions and 220 P3 regressions as of writing.

GCC 15 has been working on many changes this year including C23 as the default C language version, Arm GCS code generation, new AMD Zen 4 / Zen 5 optimizations, the Fujitsu Monaka CPU target was added, Intel Diamond Rapids support with its many new ISA features, undeprecating Itanium IA-64, AVX10.2 enablement, NVIDIA Grace CPU targeting, Zhaoxin "Shijidadao" support, IBM POWER11 support, removal of Intel Xeon Phi support, retiring Solaris 11.3 support, better Rust support with gccrs, Ada language improvements, and many other changes.