The Free Software Foundation has released version 4.9.0 of the GNU Compiler Collection, or GCC. The update “adds new features some people are looking for, improves generated code, adds support for new instruction set extensions, and improves and extends support for new language standards,” including C++11 and 14, Fortran 2008 and C11, said GCC developer Jakub Jelinek. Key improvements include devirtualization optimizations and bottleneck fixes.
Many free operating systems, including many Linux distributions, use GCC as the primary system compiler. It’s currently available for download from Gnu.org.