I've already been using it for some time (debian sid has a trunk package). it has c++26 reflection, so I already do some magical things with reflection (much better for some cases e.g. for ser-des).
I only wish they had a lsp server in their eco-system!
Large projects have been going to regular scheduled releases for a long time. Until the 90's people thought they could waterfall a large release with all your desired features (and for tiny projects this is still a good idea), but as your projects grow (possibly just to small) you reach a point where someone is always working on a feature that isn't ready yet, so a regular release means you still can support your customers with releases. This forces developers who are unsure they will be ready to have some sort of "disabled this unstable feature" toggle, which is about the best you can do.
Yup. OpenJDK is one of the best success stories of this.
Up until Java 8, they would release once features were complete. But that meant there were years between the 7 and 8 release and even more years between the 8 and 9 release.
The industry had gotten into the habit of always running old versions of Java (my company was on 6 for an uncomfortable amount of time. But others have had it worse).
More frequent smaller releases has gotten companies more into the habit of updating frequently which also, very helpfully, gives devs new features frequently.
Yeah, GCC’s recent major releases have been remarkably regular, much like Fedora’s spring releases, and their releases seem to fit into the same broader rhythm. Hint? Red Hat.
For many years that was the only version that could be used. What become gcc3 took years. In the end it was better, but for a while gcc 2.95 was the best we had despite the bugs.
I want to point out an implemented feature that people SHOULD be adopting but that I doubt will be picked up:
This is for "std::start_lifetime_as<T>". If you have not heard of this before, it's the non-UB way to type-pun a pointer into a structured type.Nearly all zero-copy code that deals with external I/O buffers looks something like:
With this merged, swap the reinterpret_cast for start_lifetime_as and you're no longer being naughty.https://en.cppreference.com/cpp/memory/start_lifetime_as
You’re allowed to type pun char buffers.
And should always use -fno-strict-aliasing anyways. The default rules are insane
I've already been using it for some time (debian sid has a trunk package). it has c++26 reflection, so I already do some magical things with reflection (much better for some cases e.g. for ser-des). I only wish they had a lsp server in their eco-system!
libstd has been giving me issues running gcc 16 binaries on Debian 12 and 13.
Does -Ofast still ignore -fno-fast-math ?
Somehow I never realized that GCC has a very regular release schedule until looking it up just now: https://gcc.gnu.org/develop.html
Large projects have been going to regular scheduled releases for a long time. Until the 90's people thought they could waterfall a large release with all your desired features (and for tiny projects this is still a good idea), but as your projects grow (possibly just to small) you reach a point where someone is always working on a feature that isn't ready yet, so a regular release means you still can support your customers with releases. This forces developers who are unsure they will be ready to have some sort of "disabled this unstable feature" toggle, which is about the best you can do.
Yup. OpenJDK is one of the best success stories of this.
Up until Java 8, they would release once features were complete. But that meant there were years between the 7 and 8 release and even more years between the 8 and 9 release.
The industry had gotten into the habit of always running old versions of Java (my company was on 6 for an uncomfortable amount of time. But others have had it worse).
More frequent smaller releases has gotten companies more into the habit of updating frequently which also, very helpfully, gives devs new features frequently.
It has been that way since people from Cygnus (now RedHat->IBM) reorganized the project
Yeah, GCC’s recent major releases have been remarkably regular, much like Fedora’s spring releases, and their releases seem to fit into the same broader rhythm. Hint? Red Hat.
IIRC, since GCC got covered by GPL3.
It used to be slower and I've spent way too much time working around C++ bugs in GCC 2.95
(The fact that I remember the problematic version is telling :)
Everybody remembers that specific version :). And I wasn't even programming professionally at that time!
For many years that was the only version that could be used. What become gcc3 took years. In the end it was better, but for a while gcc 2.95 was the best we had despite the bugs.
They changed their major release numbers too tbf. 4.x it was point release per year, now it's a major release per year.