GCC 4 released
GCC, the heart of the GNU software movement, has just been released in version 4.0.
When Linux was just beginning it was nothing more than a tiny kernel created by Linus Torvalds. The GNU project is the movement that created all of KDE, Gnome, X11, and the other billions of free and open source programs that Linux users come across every day. There is one program, however, that is truly more important than all of the others.
The GNU project would never have gotten off the ground if they hadn’t deliberately made a compiler to make their code into useable systems. They couldn’t just take an existing compiler, they had to make one from scratch. The started with a very rudimentary thing called GCC which then forked until GCC 2.0 was made out of one of the highly-developed forks. It continued until now we’ve got version 4 as of yesterday or so.
What’s so great about GCC? Well, I’ll only name two things; one old and one brand new:
- Support of ten trillion languages
So maybe not quite that many, but from ADA to Java to several kinds of C - GCC is capable of turning nearly any source code into a working program. - Super Optimization
Version 4 has what is referred to as “increased symbol visibility” among other improvements. Basically, the new GCC is able to detect connections between large pieces of code and compile it into a smaller, faster-executing program. This means that in a couple days when I download GCC 4.0 and re-compile my whole Gentoo system I’ll end up with a faster KDE.
