The New Compiler Features & Changes Of GCC 8

With GCC 8 feature development over and onto bug fixing, here is a look at some of the changes to find with the GCC 8 compiler stack that will be released as stable early next year in the form of GCC 8.1.

The official GCC 8 changes documentation remains quite bare but will be filled in by GNU Compiler Collection developers as the update nears. But in our original reporting and monitoring of GCC 8 development, some of the highlights we have to share include:

- More tuning of AMD znver1 support for yielding better performance on Ryzen / Threadripper / EPYC processors.

- Cannonlake support, the next-gen Intel CPU succeeding Coffee Lake / Kaby Lake Refresh. Exciting from the compiler side is all "Core" Cannonlake CPUs should support AVX-512.

- Initial support for Intel Icelake, the CPU generation to succeed next year's Cannonlake. This includes GFNI instructions and more.

- Intel CET support: Control-flow Enforcement Technology for better security.

- Qualcomm Saphira CPU support. Qualcomm Saphira is the next-gen core succeeding the current generation Falkor core found within the new Centriq SoCs.

- C17 language support.

- Initial work towards C++20 / C++2A.

- ARMv8-R support. This subset of the ARMv8 architecture is intended for real-time applications and safety-critical environments like automotive and industrial control and aviation.

- There's also been additional ARM tuning for the newer Cortex processors.

- Greater OpenACC 2.5 support.

- Updated Golang, the Go programming language support found within GCC.

- Continued improvements for AMD HSA IL / BRIG support.

- Cilk Plus is being removed.

- Significant improvements to the Nios II compiler back-end.

If there are any other interesting GCC 8 changes I missed out on, feel free to point them out in the forums. I'll be publishing some new GCC 8 benchmarks soon on Phoronix and will continue with our coverage ahead of its release next March~April.