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Programming GNU is Not Unix Java Open Source Upgrades

GCC 4.9 Coming With Big New Features 181

jones_supa writes "When GCC 4.9 is released in 2014 it will be coming in hot on new features with a large assortment of improvements and new functionality for the open-source compiler. Phoronix provides a recap of some of the really great features of this next major compiler release from the Free Software Foundation. For a quick list: OpenMP 4.0, Intel Cilk Plus multi-threading support, Intel Bay Trail and Silvermont support, NDS32 port, Undefined Behavior Sanitizer, Address Sanitizer, ADA and Fortran updates, improved C11 / C++11 / C++14, better x86 intrinsics, refined diagnostics output. Bubbling under are still: Bulldozer 4 / Excavator support, OpenACC, JIT compiler, disabling Java by default."
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GCC 4.9 Coming With Big New Features

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  • frist (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward

    finally

  • by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 18, 2013 @06:09AM (#45453157)

    New in this release: lots of stuff most people don't care about, some minor improvements and oh yeah we gave up on Java.

    • by symes ( 835608 )

      I have to agree - I've been trying to find out more on the multi-threading support, something that is strangely lacking detail but you would imagine could be quite popular

    • we gave up on Java.

      That's not news?

    • by cduffy ( 652 ) <charles+slashdot@dyfis.net> on Monday November 18, 2013 @07:14AM (#45453279)

      You only don't care about sanitizing standard-undefined behavior if you don't care about bugs.

      That one's a Really, Really Big Deal.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      New in this release: [...] we gave up on Java.

      Well, actually it's the other way around: Java gave up on them - meaning that actual development of GCJ moved from GCC to OpenJDK.
      Not that i understand what it means for GCC, but i understand that it does not mean much for Java.

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      I care. Or I will, in 5 years, when it's finally available in debian.
    • Where do such negative comments come from? Have programers generally left /.? :-/

      I for one welcome gcc 4.9, as it allows me to use the full Ada 2012 language. Good job!

      • by Darinbob ( 1142669 ) on Monday November 18, 2013 @02:44PM (#45456939)

        No one programs anymore. All we do is link together pre-built libraries and frameworks and wrap it all in XML. Not sure who actually codes those libraries or where they come from, but the prevailing theory is that once a year the senior developers hike to the top of Mount Olympus and wrestle them away from the gods.

      • by lgw ( 121541 )

        What, really? I had no idea gcc did Ada - that's actually pretty cool.

      • by HiThere ( 15173 )

        You don't need to wait for gcc to include the latest version of gnat. It's available for download from AdaCore http://libre.adacore.com/ [adacore.com] in either GPL or commercially supported forms. (Commercial support is intended for companies, though, not for developers. It's a slightly different version, but pretty much the same. And it comes with official support. But it's just a mite expensive. )

        • The AdaCore libre version doesn't allow you to distribute your executables under non-GPL license. You'd have to buy the super-expensive pro version instead. The FSF version of Gnat, on the other hand, does allow you to distribute your executables under any license you like because it comes under the Gnat Modified GPL (GMGPL).

          That's why I wait. :-)

    • by blueg3 ( 192743 )

      If you don't care about safety and error checking, multithreading, Atom SoCs, or C++11... what sort of new features are you really expecting in a compiler. That touches pretty much all the major functionality of a compiler.

    • I don't know, some looks interesting. I'd like to get the sanitizers for extra code checking during compile instead of waiting for an external lengthy static analysis tool.

  • ADA? (Score:5, Informative)

    by Black Parrot ( 19622 ) on Monday November 18, 2013 @06:23AM (#45453173)

    "Ada" is the name of a person, and the language.

    "ADA" is the Americans with Disabilities Act, or the American Dental Association.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 18, 2013 @06:31AM (#45453185)

    For God's sake, that's *THIRTEEN* (13) links to Phoronix!
    Pointing to a couple of ML threads or to the 4.9 changelog would've been more than enough. http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.9/changes.html

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Self-linking is the modus operandi of Phoronix. It is a link farm, after all.

      All you will get is a mass of links, whether you click through to TFA or not. At least this way there's no utility in clicking through.
    • But but Google? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by iYk6 ( 1425255 ) on Monday November 18, 2013 @07:16AM (#45453285)

      But then how would Googlebot know that Phoronix is really great and popular and they should rank it higher in searches?

    • by Ant P. ( 974313 )

      I understand the frustration, but that site *wants* to be populated entirely by the kind of morons that fall for blatant SEO spam. Smart people wouldn't make them money via pay-per-impression ad sandbagging, after all.

  • This is like Amazon book ads, only more pointless. Why not either make a submission "The GCC team needs your donation," or wait to advertise it until people can respond to the ad and download it? If it had only one new feature (and it wasn't "now secretly adds more sophisticated backdoors") people with any sort of interest in using GCC will probably get the new version when it's available.
  • by gnasher719 ( 869701 ) on Monday November 18, 2013 @06:50AM (#45453219)
    The whole article really reads quite fanboyish / alternatively GCC has hired a marketing department. But it looks really lame when you talk about exiting new features, and you just copied what Clang had before.
    • by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 18, 2013 @07:28AM (#45453319)

      Superior backend, coming up to par with Clang on the frontend, what's not to love?

      Frankly, the BSD licenses appear to be a failure psychologically. The proponents of BSD-licensed software go apeshit when GPL-licensed software reuses their code, but are ok if the stuff disappears in proprietary forks.

      You can see this, for example, with LibreOffice/OpenOffice: every LibreOffice release announcement draws ire from the OpenOffice crowd (well, particularly one OpenOffice developer) because the latter feels their code has been ripped off.

      There has been a lot of that going on with OpenBSD and FreeBSD as well, but it's grown a bit more quiet in recent years.

      Now we have the same with Clang/GCC.

      If you don't want to have your code relicensed under different licenses, use a Copyleft license. If you want to have your code relicensed under different licenses, stop complaining when somebody actually does exactly that.

      • by Anonymous Coward

        The problem with code re-usage to GPL projects is that it is so much more complicated to copy features back.
        If a proprietary project with closed source uses the BSD licensed project but add nifty functions it is just a matter of writing similar functions of your own.
        When a GNU licensed project grabs some BSD code and improves upon you can't just write code that does the same, because if you do then it is very likely that your code will end up looking very much like the GNU licensed implementation and people

        • You are re-stating the original argument about free software that has been done to death on the internet.

          To the BSD folks, they want to write software that is free as in free beer. You can take it, and do whatever you want with it. Drink it, dump it in the trash, give it to your friends, sell it. Free as in Freedom of the user

          To the GPL or Free Software Foundation folks, they want to write software that is free as in free speech. You can copy it, and distribute it, but you can't restrict other people's rights to copy it and distribute it. Just like I can't hand out a copy of the US Constitution or a speech by Abraham Lincoln and forbid other people from sharing it or publishing a copy. Free as in Freedom of the software

          You may prefer the BSD way, and that's fine, but "who isn't a zealot" is out of line. Having a different set of priorities does not make one a dick. Blatantly copying code under one license to the other is a dickish move, but re-engineering from one to the other is perfectly legitimate. And yes, I'm in the FSF camp.
          • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

            by Anonymous Coward

            To the GPL or Free Software Foundation folks, they want to write software that is free as in free speech. You can copy it, and distribute it, but you can't restrict other people's rights to copy it and distribute it.

            Uhm, the entire point of GPL is that you can restrict others right to copy it and distribute it.

          • by gnasher719 ( 869701 ) on Monday November 18, 2013 @09:59AM (#45454351)

            To the GPL or Free Software Foundation folks, they want to write software that is free as in free speech. You can copy it, and distribute it, but you can't restrict other people's rights to copy it and distribute it. Just like I can't hand out a copy of the US Constitution or a speech by Abraham Lincoln and forbid other people from sharing it or publishing a copy. Free as in Freedom of the software

            Yes, there is always the "free as in free speech" high horse, but the fact is that (a) you can't legally use GPL licensed code in a BSD project, and (b) when licensed code is moved to a BSD project and modified, you can't legally move the changes back to the BSD project.

            So these people's view of "free" is something that I can only call perverted.

            • by olau ( 314197 )

              (a) you can't legally use GPL licensed code in a BSD project

              Yes, you can. You just can't keep licensing the result as BSD, because that would circumvent the GPL license - someone could take the BSD-licensed result and put it into a proprietary code base, something that people licensing their works under the GPL are not okay with.

              But I'll grant that you that these days, it would perhaps be a good idea if you could keep the result licensed under two licenses, so the GPL-part under GPL and the rest under BSD. As long as the rest of the project is under a GPL-compatible

              • I don't think you can use GPL code in a BSD project. The BSD license states that redistribution of the software in source or binary form must include the BSD license. The BSD license includes a clause allowing redistribution of the software in binary form without guaranteed access to source code. So if you put GPL code into your BSD project, the resulting project is GPL software that can be distributed in binary form without guaranteed access to the source code, which violates the GPL.

                So you can neit
            • You can't use BSD license code in a GPL project, either, so I don't see how that makes BSD any better.
          • To the BSD folks, they want to write software that is free as in free beer. You can take it, and do whatever you want with it. Drink it, dump it in the trash, give it to your friends, sell it. Free as in Freedom of the user.

            You can do all of those with the GPL, too. The GPL is very hot on Free as in Freedom of the User. As a user you will always have those freedoms and no one can take them away from you.

            What the GPL does is restrict the freedom of the distributor slightly.

            </license pedantry>

          • To the GPL or Free Software Foundation folks, they want to write software that is free as in free speech. You can copy it, and distribute it, but you can't restrict other people's rights to copy it and distribute it. Just like I can't hand out a copy of the US Constitution or a speech by Abraham Lincoln and forbid other people from sharing it or publishing a copy. Free as in Freedom of the software

            Actually, since both the US Constitution Lincoln's speeches are now out of copyright, you can use them verbatim in a larger work, such as a novel, and restrict further copying/distribution of that novel. That's exactly how BSD licensed software works, but not GPL. If the Constitution were licensed like the GPL, and I quoted it in a novel (assuming the quote were long enough to not be covered by the fair use exemption) then I would have to release my entire novel under the GPL as well. So your example rea

      • by Bengie ( 1121981 )

        You can see this, for example, with LibreOffice/OpenOffice: every LibreOffice release announcement draws ire from the OpenOffice crowd (well, particularly one OpenOffice developer) because the latter feels their code has been ripped off.

        What? These are both GPL. I've never seen BSD people care at all about who uses their code, only GPL people freaking out. How did this hogwash get voted up?

      • by ljw1004 ( 764174 )

        the BSD licenses appear to be a failure psychologically. The proponents of BSD-licensed software go apeshit when GPL-licensed software reuses their code, but are ok if the stuff disappears in proprietary forks.

        You can see this, for example, with LibreOffice/OpenOffice: every LibreOffice release announcement draws ire from the OpenOffice crowd (well, particularly one OpenOffice developer) because the latter feels their code has been ripped off.

        That's okay. I'm a huge proponent of BSD and I'm delighted wherever it goes. I'm not sure which proponents you're referring to, but they might be figments of your own prejudices, and I don't believe that any individual examples of your phenomenon would be representative.

    • by mvdwege ( 243851 ) <mvdwege@mail.com> on Monday November 18, 2013 @07:36AM (#45453361) Homepage Journal

      Wait, what, Clang now supports other languages than C-derivatives, like Ada and Fortran?

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Yep. They're also stealing OMP4.0 from Clang (which got OMP3.1 just a month or so ago, while GCC had it since 4.7) and Cilk (which is not in Clang at all, though people are working on 3rd party extension)

        The whole post really reads quite trollish / alternatively Clang has hired black PR department.

  • by joncombe ( 623734 ) on Monday November 18, 2013 @07:47AM (#45453397) Homepage
    I see from the status page the Regex support is still not complete, part of the C++11 standard. It would be nice if support for this standard could be completed before starting on C++14.
    • by dremon ( 735466 )
      Their status html docs aren't updated yet to reflect the actual status. Look at the gcc/libstdc++-v3/doc/xml/manual/status_cxx2011.xml file for the up to date information (or the gcc/libstdc++-v3/ChangeLog for technical revision history).
      • In open source software as in proprietary, often the out-of-date component of the project is the documentation.
    • Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use regular expressions." Now they have two problems. - Jamie Zawinski, 1997
    • Supported or not, <regex> may yield surprising results when used with UTF-8 or other Unicode text [stackoverflow.com], so those may require a non-<regex> library or the proposed <unicode> header for C++14 [open-std.org] anyway.

      • by spitzak ( 4019 )

        Actually the behavior of regex on UTF-8 is probably desirable.

        Suggestions that "*" mean any number of repeats of make as much sense as suggesting that "the*" means the user wants any number of repeats of "the" (rather than the 'e') because "the" is an English word. It adds hugely to complexity of regexp for no actual gain except for idiots who think the codeunits are actually an item you want to manipulate because you are totally unaware of non-European languages. You should be manipulating words of variab

        • by spitzak ( 4019 )

          Damn slashdot ate my angle brackets:

          Suggestions that "<codeunit>*" mean any number of repeats of make as much sense as suggesting that "the*" means the user wants any number of repeats of "the" (rather than the 'e') because "the" is an English word.

          • by dkf ( 304284 )

            Suggestions that "<codeunit>*" mean any number of repeats of make as much sense as suggesting that "the*" means the user wants any number of repeats of "the" (rather than the 'e') because "the" is an English word.

            Do you mean bytes or characters? While you think these are the same thing, you'll continue to be very confused.

            • by spitzak ( 4019 )

              I meant code point, not code unit. Ie what you are calling a "character". I typed the wrong thing there which does not help. You are correct that people thinking they can work in code points rather than bytes (or words for UTF-16) are a huge problem and why Unicode is not working yet. I consider anybody who thinks Unicode requires more than 8-bit code units to be in this category. A further problem is that a lot of people think the code points are "characters", which is actually an undefined entity in Unico

      • by spitzak ( 4019 )

        That "proposed standard" is very very bad. http://www.open-std.org/JTC1/SC22/WG21/docs/papers/2013/n3572.html [open-std.org]

        It does not support decoding UTF-8 in an error-preserving way, and appears to also remove the ability to default character strings to UTF-8.

        These are complete job-stopping bugs. Though if the intention was to try to save all the misguided investment in "wide characters" by making it as hard as possible to use UTF-8, it is a good attempt, and I suspect that is the underlying reason for this.

    • It would be nice to have regex support, but I wouldn't want them to halt their entire development pipeline to implement it. If they had to finish implementing the previous standard before starting on the next one, we would still be on C++03 on account of exported templates.
  • by plopez ( 54068 ) on Monday November 18, 2013 @01:58PM (#45456519) Journal

    Please edit and re-submit.

  • Thank you, Clang (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Urkki ( 668283 ) on Monday November 18, 2013 @03:06PM (#45457147)

    Clang has really become a boon to open source compiler development. Unlike the open source *BSD operating systems, which are too far behind the GPL operating systems in many measures (not all), Clang has really electrified the compiler scene.

    I see nothing but good things coming from this in near future.

    And in such a rapidly evolving area as compiler development, having a *BSD license does not really hurt either. It's not like the *compiler* is likely to get put into some device with proprietary modifications.

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