GCC 9.1 releases with improved diagnostics, simpler C++ errors and much more

Just two months ago, the team behind GCC (GNU Compiler Collection) made certain changes to GCC 9.1. And Last week, the team released GCC 9.1 with improved diagnostics, location and simpler C++ errors.

What’s new in GCC 9.1?

Changes to diagnostics

The team added a left-hand margin that shows line numbers. GCC 9.1 now has a new look for the diagnostics. The diagnostics can label regions of the source code in order to show relevant information. The diagnostics come with left-hand and right-hand sides of the “+” operator, so GCC highlights them inline. The team has added a JSON output format such that GCC 9.1 now has a machine-readable output format for diagnostics.

C++ errors

The compiler usually has to consider several functions while dealing with C++ at a given call site and reject all of them for different reasons. Also, the g++‘s error messages need to be handled and a specific reason needs to be given for rejecting each function. This makes simple cases difficult to read. This release comes with a special-casing to simplify g++ errors for common cases.

Improved C++ syntax in GCC 9.1

The major issue within GCC’s internal representation is that not every node within the syntax tree has a source location. For GCC 9.1, the team has worked to solve this problem so that most of the places in the C++ syntax tree now retain location information for longer.

Users can now emit optimization information

GCC 9.1 can now automatically vectorize loops and reorganize them to work on multiple iterations at once. Users will now have an option, -fopt-info, that will help in emitting optimization information.

Improved runtime library in GCC 9.1

This release comes with improved experimental support for C++17, including <memory_resource>. There will also be a support for opening file streams with wide character paths on Windows.