The GCC compiler and the GNU toolchain ecosystem at large had a great year. From new language front-ends for the likes of Algol 68 and COBOL to maturing support for GCC Rust, new performance optimizations from GCC to Glibc, initial AMD Zen 6 “znver6” support merged for GCC 16, and much more. It’s pretty safe to say GCC and the broader GNU ecosystem enjoyed a very successful 2025.
With the end of the year upon us, below is a look at the most popular GNU news stories on Phoronix for 2025 to relive some of the most exciting moments of the year. Or in case you missed any of your daily Phoronix readings, there are plenty of interesting technical tid-bits that attracted a lot of reader interest.
GCC Steering Committee Allows New Language Front-End To Land For GCC 16
Joining Ada, C/C++, COBOL, D, Fortran, Go, Modula-2, Objective-C/Objective-C++ and Rust is now another programming language expected to be added for the GCC 16 compiler release due out in the new year.
Bash 5.3 Released With Many Improvements
Three years since the Bash 5.2 release and one year since the first alpha release, GNU Bash 5.3 was released overnight as the newest step forward for this popular shell used on Linux and other operating systems.
GCC Rust Compiler Continues Quest To Compile The Linux Kernel Crate
The GCC Rust compiler “gccrs” compiler developers have been keeping at it toward their goal of being able to compile the Linux kernel’s Rust kernel crate and as part of that the Rust core library.
GCC Patches Posted For Half-Century Old ALGOL 68 Programming Language
Mere hours into 2025 and some news I didn’t expect to be writing about… An Oracle engineer has posted a set of patches implementing an ALGOL 68 programming language front-end for the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC). These are work-in-progress patches for the half century old niche programming language.
GCC 16 Switches To Using C++20 Standard By Default
Following up on the discussion from earlier this month among GCC developers over switching to C++20 by default for the GCC compiler as the default C++ standard when not otherwise set, that change has indeed happened. Merged now is the change defaulting to C++20 (well, the GNU++20 dialect) rather than C++17/GNU++17 when not otherwise specified when compiling C++ code.
GNU Gold Linker Is Deprecated & Will Be Gone For Good Without New Developers
With the recent GNU Binutils 2.44 release, one of the changes is worth calling out in its own article: the GNU Gold linker is now officially deprecated and is now being segregated to its own extra Binutils package but risks being removed all together without new developer volunteers stepping up to maintain this linker.
GNU Emacs 30.1 Released With Android Support, Emacs Lisp Native Compiler By Default
GNU Emacs 30.1 is out today as the newest version of this extensible text editor.
Glibc Math Code Sees 4x Improvement On AMD Zen By Changing FMA Implementation
Merged this week to the GNU C Library “glibc” code is dropping the ldbl-96 FMA implementation from this library as in doing so they found a 4x improvement to throughput and latency on AMD Zen 3 hardware.
Another Round Of Rust Compiler Improvements Merged For GCC 15.1
A few days ago there was a batch of 145 patches merged for the upcoming GCC 15 compiler release to enhance the Rust “gccrs” front-end. That big set of patches merged the Polonius borrow checker and made other notable improvements. Today another 144 patches for enhancing gccrs were merged ahead of the GCC 15.1 stable release due out in the coming weeks.
GNU C Library Lands Workaround After Breaking Various Steam Games, Discord & Other Apps
The release of the GNU C Library 2.41 at the end of January ended up inadvertently breaking some Steam games, Discord, Julia, MATLAB, and other select user-space software. A workaround was merged today for Glibc to workaround the problem.
GCC Developer Discovers “Our Codebase Isn’t Fully C++20 Ready”
Following the recent idea floated to consider C++20 as the default C++ language dialect by the GCC compiler rather than C++17, it was discovered that the GNU Compiler Collection itself has problems building in C++20 model.
Rust Additions For GCC 15 Bring Support For if-let Statements, Other Improvements
This past week a lot of new code for the Rust “gccrs” front-end began being merged for the upcoming GCC 15.1 stable release… The Polonius borrow checker landed along with other big improvements to the Rust code ahead of this annual GNU Compiler Collection release. A third round was merged on Friday adding yet more gccrs features.
GCC 15.1 Released With COBOL Compiler & Many Other Improvements
GCC 15.1 was just released as the newest annual feature release to the GNU Compiler Collection. This first stable GCC 15 release brings a COBOL compiler front-end, many C and C++ language support improvements, support for new CPUs and ISA capabilities, better Rust programming language support, debugging enhancements, and a whole lot more.
GRUB Continues Working Toward Its Next Release In 2025
As somewhat of an annual tradition for the FOSDEM conference, Daniel Kiper of Oracle presented a status update on the GRUB bootloader. As one of the GRUB maintainers he offers great insight to activity around this most common Linux bootloader.
Big Rust Update Merged For GCC 15 – Lands The Polonius Borrow Checker
Some 145 patches for the Rust “gccrs” front-end were posted today and subsequently merged to GCC Git ahead of the upcoming GCC 15.1 stable release.
GNU C Library Sees Up To 12.9x Improvement With New Generic FMA Implementation
Just a few days ago I wrote about the Glibc math code seeing a 4x improvement on AMD Zen by changing the used FMA implementation. Merged overnight was a new generic FMA implementation for the GNU C Library and now yielding up to a 12.9x throughput improvement on AMD Zen 3.
GCC Developers Discuss Dropping Poorly Supported, Niche CPU Architectures
Following the discussion over potentially obsoleting/deprecating the Itanium IA-64 support within the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), developers are discussing similar treatment for some of the other poorly-maintained CPU ports.
COBOL Language Frontend Merged For GCC 15 Compiler
A big albeit late feature landed today for the upcoming GCC 15 compiler… The COBOL programming language front-end has been merged!
GNU Coreutils 9.8 Released With New Features
While the Rust Coreutils project has been generating a lot of interest recently from the uutils initiative, the upstream GNU Coreutils project isn’t slowing down and today is out with GNU Coreutils 9.8 for shipping the newest features.
AMD Starts Enabling Zen 6 “znver6” Compiler Support In GCC
Making for a bit more exciting weekend is that minutes ago AMD has posted their first patch for enabling Zen 6 processor support within the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) for -march=znver6 targeting.
