The GCC 14 compiler had marked the Itanium IA-64 code as being obsolete and slated for removal in GCC 15. But then last year the Itanium port was un-deprecated with plans to “support this for some years to come.” Now one year later it’s back to talking about deprecating/obsoleting the Itanium IA-64 compiler code in GCC.
As there hasn’t been a full GCC test suite run in one year and falling behind in supporting other GCC features compared to other CPU architectures, marking Itanium IA-64 as obsolete is back to being talked about. Plus hardware is increasingly rare, there are no Itanium build bots for the GCC compiler, and user-mode emulation of IA-64 is slow and incomplete.
This GCC mailing list thread this week reignited the discussion over marking Itanium as obsolete for the GNU Compiler Collection.
Beyond the lack of build bots / IA-64 hardware access and no formal maintainer of the GCC Itanium code, this post in the thread outlines some of the limitations of the IA-64 code due to it not being actively maintained. There is incomplete C23 support due to needing the BitInt ABI, no progress on new bugs, and the lack of upstream Linux kernel and Glibc support further complicates the usage and future of Itanium support.
So short of a serious commitment and tangible action happening around IA-64 for GCC, it looks like GCC 16 could end up marking IA-64 once again as obsolete and then a candidate for removal.
