The Free Software Foundation compiler team has announced the release of GCC 6.1. The release comes timely and marks the start of the Version 6 series.
GCC or GNU Compiler Collection is basically a bunch of open source front ends for C, C++, Objective-C, Fortran, Java and Ada. It also includes respective development libraries.
What’s new in GCC 6.1
One of the biggest and most notable change in GCC 6.1 is that the default mode for C++ is now -std=gnu++14 or C++14. C++ Concepts are now optionally supported.
There are quite a number of optimizer improvements such as strict checking of array bounds. Value range propagation now assumes that the this pointer of C++ member functions is non-null therefore breaking non-conforming code in Qt 5, Chromium and KDevelop.
Again there are improvements in OpenACC which is a collection of compiler directives to specify loops and regions of code in C, C++ and Fortran to be offloaded from a host CPU to an attached GPU or other accelerator.
Some support for older ARM and MeP architectures are ow deprecated while AArch64 support has been improved. There is also now support for the Intel CPU Skylake architecture.
To get the whole detailed list of changes in GCC 6.1 you can visit the official changelog and get the details. You can download the latest version from the official mirrors page.
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