GNU News Archives

Merged yesterday to the GCC Git development codebase for next year's GCC 17 release is the initial infrastructure laying out support for -std=c++29 and the like for targeting the C++29 standard not anticipated for release until around 2029.

Last month a new GCC back-end was proposed for WebAssembly to allow C/C++ code to be compiled to WASM with this GNU compiler toolchain. The GCC Steering Committee has evaluated it and approves the notion of WebAssembly back-end for GCC.

Following yesterday's release of the upstream Linux 7.1 kernel release, GNU Linux-libre 7.1 is out with its new build for de-blobbing various drivers from loading non-free-software microcode/firmware and other sanitizing of the kernel code in the name of software freedom.

Earlier this month I wrote about Intel working on function multi-versioning support for APX and AVX10.2 with the GCC compiler. This allows developers to write optimized code paths specifically targeting Advanced Performance Extensions (APX) or Advanced Vector Extensions 10.2 capabilities of future processors while being able to otherwise fall-back to generic or other optimized code paths for other ISA target features. This work is now merged for GCC 17.

For those relying on last year's stable GCC 15 series in not yet having migrated to the latest GCC 16, out today is GCC 15.3 to ship all of the latest back-ported bug fixes.

NVIDIA engineer Kyrylo Tkachov posted a patch for testing yesterday to significantly reduce the amount of time it takes the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) for conducting a native bootstrap. The time spent in the configure process for native GCC builds is reduced by around 43% while the overall bootstrap wall time is lowered by around 15%.

For those looking for open-source food nutrition software, GNU's GNUtrition has seen its first new release in 14 years.

When it comes to compiling C/C++ code to WebAssembly (WASM), LLVM/Clang and other LLVM-based tooling has dominated the space. Nearly a decade ago was a proposal for a GCC WebAssembly back-end that ultimately never ended up being merged while now there is a new proposal for a WebAssembly back-end for the GNU toolchain.

GCC 16.1 is now available as the first stable release of GCC 16 as this year's major open-source GNU compiler feature release.

Merged today to the GCC Git compiler codebase, which will be for GCC 17 rather than the imminent GCC 16.1 stable release, is adding support for the Chinese-manufactured Hygon C86-4G-M4 / C86-4G-M6 / C86-4G-M7 series x86_64 processors.

GCC 16.1 as the first stable version of the GCC 16 compiler is releasing as soon as later this week if all goes well. Among the many improvements in this year's open-source compiler update are continued enhancements to the error messages as well as having an experimental HTML output option for messages.

The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) now has a working group established by their steering committee to study the use of AI and large language models (LLMs) within the context of GCC compiler development.

GCC 16.1 as the first stable version of the GCC 16 compiler is nearly ready for its official debut as this year's major feature release for this open-source compiler.

It's not only the uutil's Rust Coreutils project seeing performance improvements but some increased healthy competition now from GNU Coreutils. With today's release of GNU Coreutils 9.11 the wc command is up to multiple times faster and even cat can be up to 15 times faster.

Building off last night's release of the Linux 7.0 kernel is now the GNU Linux-libre 7.0-gnu kernel release for that downstream kernel that removes support for loading non-free-software kernel modules, blocks the loading of loadable microcode/firmware even when it means greatly reduced hardware support, and other sanitization of code in the name of software freedom.

Version 0.27 of GNUnet is now available for this free software framework for constructing decentralized, peer-to-peer networking. But it comes with some big caveats before use.

A bit of time has passed since having any exciting performance improvements to report on within the GNU C Library "glibc" but that changed today with another nice x86_64 optimization for modern CPUs.

Richard Biener of SUSE published a new status report on the state of GCC 16 development. Regression fixing has been going slow but they are hoping to publish a release candidate by mid-April.

After hearing last month that GNU Hurd is "almost there" with x86_64 support, it was exciting to kickoff today by seeing a developer headline "The 64-bit Hurd is Here!" GNU Hurd 64-bit support is now said to be ready but SMP support for multiple processor cores and the like remain still in development.

Developers behind the widely-used GNU Awk text processing utility today released Gawk 5.4.

Following last week's release of GNU Coreutils 9.10, released today is GNU Binutils 2.46 for these commonly used GNU binary utilities on Linux systems and elsewhere.

The GNU Nettle cryptographic library is out with a major new update that introduces support for SLH-DSA, the post-quantum signature scheme selected by NIST for the FIPS 205 standard.

Earlier this week Rust Coreutils 0.6 released while out today is GNU Coreutils 9.10 as the de facto standard for this set of core utilities on Linux systems and other platforms.

Samuel Thibault offered up a status update on the current state of GNU/Hurd from a presentation in Brussels at FOSDEM 2026. Thibault has previously shared updates on GNU Hurd from the annual FOSDEM event while this year's was a bit more optimistic thanks to recent driver progress and more software now successfully building for Hurd.

Werner Koch released libgcrypt 1.12 as the newest feature release to this library providing the cryptographic building blocks used by GnuPG and other software like email clients, file encryption utilities, and other software.

Sun Microsystems began developing gettext in the early 1990s and the GNU Project began GNU gettext development in 1995 for this widely-used internationalization and localization system commonly for multi-lingual integration. While GNU gettext is commonly used by countless open-source projects and adapted for many different programming languages, only an hour ago was GNU gettext 1.0 finally released.

GNU C Library "glibc" developers have decided to move ahead with plans of migrating their core services from Sourcware.org infrastructure over to the Core Toolchain Infrastructure "CTI" project hosted by the Linux Foundation.

Version 2.43 of the GNU C Library "glibc" was released on Friday evening as the newest half-year feature update. This is a very feature packed update and even managed to be released ahead of the 1 February release plan.

More than two years after the release of GRUB 2.12, GRUB 2.14 shipped today as the newest feature release of this widely-used bootloader on Linux systems and elsewhere.

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.

While veteran open-source developer Keith Packard is known for his X.Org Server contributions over many years, another more recent open-source creation of his is Picolibc as a C library for embedded systems. As the latest achievement on that front, merged this weekend to the GCC 16 compiler codebase is support for using Picolibc.

GNU ddrescue as the free software data recovery tool from files or block devices is out today with a big feature release. The new GNU ddrescue 1.30 is improved by "orders of magnitude" for the automatic recovery from drives with a dead head.

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.

Merged ahead of the upcoming GCC 16.1 stable release of the GCC 16 compiler is initial support for the Armv9.6-A target.

The GNU Debugger "GDB" 17.1 is out today with a number of new features for enhancing the open-source debugging experience.

The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) developers now have a need to set a policy whether AI / Large Language Model (LLM) generated patches will be accepted for this open-source compiler stack.

The GNU C Library's malloc implementation is now enabling 2MB Transparent Huge Pages (THP) by default for AArch64 Linux. This is being done in the name of better performance -- a healthy 6.25% performance improvement is noted for SPEC with this change.

When it comes to AMD Radeon/Instinct GPU compiler support much of the emphasis is on the LLVM/Clang compiler stack with their official AMDGPU LLVM shader compiler back-end as well as having the AOMP downstream compiler fork and the like. But the GNU Compiler Collection "GCC" does continue allow targeting AMD GPU targeting with its "AMDGCN" back-end and using the likes of the OpenMP API. It's not too often seeing new AMD GPU activity there for GCC but merged today is now support for managed memory.

Following yesterday's Linux 6.18 kernel release, GNU Linux-libre 6.18-gnu is out today as the latest release of this free software purist kernel that will drop/block drivers from loading microcode/firmware considered non-free-software and other restrictions in the name of not pushing binary blobs even when needed for hardware support/functionality on otherwise open-source drivers.

Making for an exciting holiday weekend night is the Algol 68 programming language front-end "ga68" being merged into the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) codebase. After COBOL language support landed in GCC 15 earlier this year, next year's GCC 16 release is adding support for the half-century old Algol 68 programming language.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Since the start of the new year, there have been patches being posted for proposing a new GCC compiler front-end for the half-century old Algol 68 programming language. Oracle engineer Jose Marchesi has been leading the Algol 68 effort for GCC and this weekend posted a new revision of the patches, which now includes a working modules system implementation.

The Wild linker is a very speedy linker written in the Rust programming language that has become quite competitive with the likes of Mold. A patch sent out this weekend adds Wild support for use with the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC).

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.

Introduced last year in the Linux 6.10 kernel was the mseal system call for memory sealing to protect the memory mapping against modifications to seal non-writable memory segments or better protecting sensitive data structures. The GNU C Library has finally introduced its mseal function making use of this modern Linux kernel functionality.

Compiler engineer Marek Polacek of Red Hat recently proposed making the C++20 language specification (or rather the GNU++20 dialect) the default C++ version when not otherwise specified.

Following yesterday's release of Rust Coreutils 0.4, GNU Coreutils 9.9 is now available as the latest update to this set of core utilities common to Linux systems and other platforms.