Bye Bye Cilk Plus: GCC Lightened By 82k L.O.C.

Earlier this month I reported on Intel's plans for removing Cilk Plus from GCC 8 since this parallel programming effort of theirs was depreciated in GCC 7 and hadn't seen much adoption. It's now official with the code being stripped out of the GCC 8 code-base.

As of this morning, it's official and Cilk Plus was removed. This marks an end to Cilk Plus in GCC that had only been in GCC since 5.0 and this multi-threaded parallel computing extension for C/C++ that was originally devised at MIT in the late 90's.

Similarly, Intel's LLVM/Clang fork with Cilk Plus support hasn't been updated since February 2016.

Removing Cilk Plus from the GCC code-base has resulted in 82,706 lines of code deleted across 382 files.

Onwards to OpenMP, OpenACC, and friends along with the other new features of GCC 8.