GCC 8 Will Enter Its Last Stage Of Development Next Week

The GNU Compiler Collection 8 (GCC 8) is currently in "stage three" development whereby general bug fixing can still happen along with allowing new ports to be added. But that is changing next week as it enters its final stage of development prior to release.

SUSE's Richard Biener announced that on 14 January, they will be going into their strict "regression and documentation fixes mode similar as if trunk was a release branch."

During this stage they enforce making sure all changes are only documentation updates and regression fixes. At this time they have nine open P1 regressions (the highest priority), 134 P2 regressions, 108 P3 regressions, and 161 P4 regressions. That's quite a lot they are hoping to now get under control with the stable GCC 8 release as "GCC 8.1" likely coming in March or perhaps April depending upon how quickly they get this release tidied up.

This latest GCC 8 status report from earlier today can be read on the mailing list.

It remains to be seen if the GCC patches for Spectre / Retpoline will make it into GCC 8.1. Aside from that, there's a lot of new features and improvements in GCC 8.