GCC 9 Feature Development Is Ending Next Month

There is just three weeks left for GNU toolchain developers to finish landing new feature material in GCC 9.0 ahead of next year's GCC 9.1 stable release.

Richard Biener of SUSE announced today that GCC's "stage 1" development will shift to "stage 3" on 11 November. This marks the point at which open feature development is over and will then focus on bug-fixing... No new features are generally allowed in during this stage. On 6 January 2019 is when they intend to begin their final period of only working on regression fixes and documentation updates.

This development cadence is usual for their yearly release dance and if all goes well GCC 9.1 will be out as the first GCC9 stable release around the end of March or April.

Biener announced the timeline for shifting to the final stages of development on the GCC list for those interested. It will be interesting to see what more lands in the GCC9 code-base over these remaining weeks while overall there has been a lot landing in recent months. I'll have my feature overview and compiler benchmarks to come.