GCC 16 as this year’s major feature release of the GNU Compiler Collection should be out in the typical March~April timeframe if all goes well. Today the GCC 16 compiler transitioned to its final stage “stage 4” of development with a focus exclusively on documentation and regression fixing.
After being in stage three development since November to focus on bug fixing, GCC 16 is now under stage four development with a focus on just documentation updates and regression fixes. No new features will be permitted unless being granted approval by the GCC release managers.
GCC 16.1 release candidates will begin once hitting zero regressions of P1 status — the highest priority for bugs. Currently there are 51 bugs of P1 status, an increase of 33 from the prior report. Those bugs either need to be fixed or deemed worthy of demoting to a lower priority state.
GCC 16 entering stage four development was confirmed today on the GCC mailing list.
The GCC 16 (GCC 16.1) feature release is introducing Armv9.6-A target support, initial AMD Zen 6 support “Znver6” for its new ISA capabilities but not yet any instruction tuning/cost adjustments, Picolibc support, AMD GPU managed memory support, C++20 by default when not otherwise specified, Intel Nova Lake compiler support is ready, Intel Wildcat Lake support, increasing the default LTO partition count, and adding the Algol 68 programming language front-end. Plus many bug fixes and other minor improvements.
