GCC 11 Ending Feature Development In One Month

The GNU Compiler Collection 11 (GCC 11) will be ending stage one development in mid-November to get the release process underway.

SUSE's Richard Biener issued the first GCC 11.0 status report and indicated that stage one development will end on 15 November. This stage of development is for the generic development of this next major GCC release and where all new feature code changes are allowed.

After 15 November is when stage three development begins (per their current processes, there is not a stage two) and that is when the focus shifts to general bug fixing.

As of today's status report there are 33 P1 regressions that are bugs of the highest priority. There are also 256 P2 regressions, 74 P3 regressions, 185 P4 regressions, and 24 P5 issues.

If all goes according to their usual release cadence, GCC 11 as the annual big open-source compiler update should debut as stable in March~April. GCC 11 has been seeing work on new Intel CPU instruction set features like AMX and other new bits for Sapphire Rapids / Alder Lake, the removal of HSA offloading, Fujitsu A64FX support, continued Radeon GPU offloading work, the C++17 dialect is used in the C++ front-end by default, expanded C++20 capabilities, and much more. We haven't yet seen any AMD Zen 3 (znver3) support added yet but hopefully that will make it in time.