New GNU and Sun C/C++ Compilers

Good news for C and C++ coders lately. First, GCC 4.2 is out, and while GCC 4.1.X generally received poor reviews and little adoption, 4.2 is looking pretty solid with large projects like FreeBSD and Debian already making the jump on their development branches. My prediction is that 4.2 will be the release that gets a lot of projects off the 3.4.x compiler and will become the new de facto standard for OSS projects. Cool to see OpenMP support in GCC with this release. I used OpenMP via Sun’s “Studio” (formely called Forte, then Workshop) 10 and 11 compilers at my last gig, which leads me to the next bit of news. Sun Studio 12 has been released for both Solaris and Linux! Sun’s compilers have traditionally been superb on SPARC, but recent releases are producing really quick x86 code too. If you’ve got a CPU heavy piece of code, it’s certainly worth taking both of these new compilers (and their optimization flags) for a spin. Studio 12 is also sporting a new NetBeans-based IDE, if you’re into that sort of thing.