What's in store for GCC

The conference presentations give some insight into the focus of the developers who are working on GCC, and technical direction for the project. For example, last year's GCC Developers' Summit included three talks on support for 64-bit systems, including the IBM's S/390 and x86-64 architecture. If last year's Summit is any example, you can expect GCC to include many of the features that are being talked about this year at the Summit.

One heavy focus that's carried over from last year is testing and benchmarking code produced by GCC. Árpád Beszédes of the University of Szeged will be speaking about the Code-Size Benchmark Environment (CSiBE) for GCC, which is used to measure the size of code produced by GCC. (Beszédes's paper from last year is available for those who are interested.) Paolo Carlini of SUSE is also focusing on performance in his presentation, on approaches being used to improve performance in the GNU Standard C++ Library v3 (libstdc++-v3).

David Edelsohn will present a paper on loop optimizations for GCC using high-level loop transformations. The loop optimizations described by Edelsohn are implemented on top of Tree SSA, which was an up-and-coming project for GCC when described at last year's GCC Developers' Summit. (Slides in PDF are available.) Now it's headed for inclusion in GCC 3.5. (See this week's Development Page for more information on Tree-SSA).

Diego Novillo will be speaking about the design and implementation of Tree SSA this year. According to Novillo, several other GCC optimizations are being implemented on top of Tree SSA as well. Dorit Naishlos will be speaking about another optimization technique, automatic vectorization, that is implemented on top of Tree SSA.

Users of the GNU Compiler for the Java Programming Language (GCJ) may be interested in Andrew Haley and Tom Tromey's paper on the new GCJ binary-compatibility ABI which will "let us upgrade the compiler and runtime library in many useful ways without requiring any application-level recompilation", instead of breaking binary compatibility with each new release. Nathan Sidwell's presentation will make the case for implementing statically typed trees in GCC, with an outline for a full conversion from dynamically typed trees.

In all, there are fifteen scheduled presentations, and two Birds of a Feather session, for the Summit. Abstracts for all of the paper presentations are available on the GCC Developers' Summit website. For those with a little extra time on their hands, registration for the event is open and it promises to be a fun three days for anyone interested in GCC and compiler development.