OpenRISC Will Be Accepted Into The GCC Compiler

The GCC Steering Committee is accepting OpenRISC as the newest architecture port for inclusion into the GNU Compiler Collection.

While OpenRISC has been around longer than the RISC-V ISA that is already supported in GCC, the OpenRISC port had run into complications. The original developers working on the OpenRISC GCC code were not okay with the required copyright assignment of the code to the Free Software Foundation as a requirement for upstreaming the work.

So a developer ended up doing a clean room rewrite of the OpenRISC compiler code for GCC. That code was recently published and the GCC Steering Committee has now signed off on this being the newest processor target for GCC.

The committee announced their decision today on the GCC mailing list. This port should land in time for next year's GCC 9 stable release.