Part 1: To bigger things in GCC-14
In the GCC 14 release, as with all other releases, Arm has worked closely together with the community to bring a much-improved compiler. This release however has been somewhat different in that we took a step back and re-evaluated where we are and where we want to go in not just this release but future ones considering the compiler release cycle. With that in mind, GCC 14 now fresh out has been a larger release than normal. Read on for what Arm and the community have been up to and a glimpse into the direction of travel.
As with any project GCC has a lot of technical debt. However, due to its size, age and large number of architectures it supports this technical debt ranges from annoyances to major blockers for development. With every release, the goal is to improve the compiler without making it harder to maintain. Every so often we must take a step back and just focus on maintenance before adding new features.
The end of this blog will also discuss two technical debts that we addressed this year to aid in helping the process of contributing to GCC itself.
