DragonFlyBSD Finally Defaulting To GCC 8 Compiler, Replacing The Old GCC 5

With the last of the major GCC 8 build issues of the DragonFlyBSD code-base resolved, this BSD operating system has switched to using this latest stable release of the GNU Compiler Collection by default.

This is a big default change for DragonFlyBSD as up to now its default compiler was using the several year old GCC 5. With the default move to GCC 8 comes many optimizations, particularly for newer Intel and AMD CPU microarchitectures. This is especially good news for AMD Zen "znver1" CPU users. There is also support for newer C/C++ language features and many other enhancements as we've covered over the past few years.

GCC 8 was available up to now but not the default on DragonFly. As of earlier this week, the change was made where GCC8 has succeeded GCC5 in being the default compiler, including for building DPorts.

This is yet another change making DragonFlyBSD 5.4 sure to be an exciting release. I'll likely run some DragonFlyBSD 5.3-DEVELOPMENT benchmark comparisons in the days ahead. DragonFlyBSD continues to be one of the last major BSDs using the GNU Compiler Collection by default over LLVM/Clang.