Cauldron 2014: GCC & LLVM Will Look To Collaborate More

Last week in Cambridge (UK) was the GNU Tools Cauldron 2014 conference where a number of interesting GCC-related talks took place, including greater collaboration between the GCC and LLVM/Clang compiler crews.

At this year's GNU Tools Cauldron is where it was discussed and decided upon that GCC 5.0 will be released in 2015 in place of the GCC 4.10 release. Some other highlights from this conference included:

- Talk of more increased collaboration between the GCC and LLVM camps. Developers want to have more pro-active discussions on issues as opposed to the status quo of reactive discussions that happen after the fact. This talk of collaboration has been going on for a few months and was covered earlier this year on Phoronix. Among the areas to collaborate on going forward would be over common compiler flags and their semantics, common projects like sanitizers to collaborate on, potentially a new common user interface, standardization of attributes/extensions/built-ins/ASM/linker-API.

- Glibc is in a 2.20 "slushy" freeze mode. For Glibc 2.21 might be a NIOS II port, AArch64 ILP32 ABI support, OpenRISC support, and Native Client (NaCl) handling.

- GCC's embedded JIT support was discussed too. There's an experimental JIT compiler for Python written against this libgccjit library.

- The various "Sanitizers" like Address Sanitizer are continuing to progress.

The notes from this year's GNU Tools Cauldron can be found via this mailing list post.