GCC 2.95.2
October 27, 1999
The GNU project and the GCC developers are pleased to announce the
release of GCC version 2.95.2. GCC used to stand for the GNU C Compiler, but
since the compiler supports several other languages aside from C, it now stands
for the GNU Compiler Collection.
This is a minor release to address several bugs in the GCC version 2.95.1
release.
The -fstrict-aliasing is not enabled by default for GCC 2.95.2. While the
optimizations performed by -fstrict-aliasing are valid according to the C and
C++ standards, the optimization have caused some problems, particularly with
old non-conforming code.
The GCC developers are experimenting with ways to warn users about code
which violates the C/C++ standards, but those warnings are not ready for
widespread use at this time. Rather than wait for those warnings the GCC
developers have chosen to disable -fstrict-aliasing by default for the
GCC 2.95.2 release.
We strongly encourage developers to find and fix code which violates
the C/C++ standards as -fstrict-aliasing may be enabled by default in future
releases. Use the option -fstrict-aliasing to re-enable these optimizations.
- Generic bugfixes and improvements
- Fix incorrectly optimized memory reference in global common
subexpression elimination (GCSE) optimization pass.
- Fix code generation bug in regmove.c in which it could
incorrectly change a "const" value.
- Fix bug in optimization of conditionals involving volatile
memory references.
- Avoid over-allocation of stack space for some procedures.
- Fixed bug in the compiler which caused incorrect optimization
of an obscure series of bit manipulations, shifts and arithmetic.
- Fixed register allocator bug which caused teTeX to be mis-compiled
on Sparc targets.
- Avoid incorrect optimization of degenerate case statements for
certain targets such as the ARM.
- Fix out of range memory reference in the jump optimizer.
- Avoid dereferencing null pointer in fix-header.
- Fix test for GCC specific features so that it is possible
to bootstrap with gcc-2.6.2 and older versions of GCC.
- Fix typo in scheduler which could potentially cause out of
range memory accesses.
- Avoid incorrect loop reversal which caused incorrect code for
certain loops on PowerPC targets.
- Avoid incorrect optimization of switch statements on certain
targets (for example the ARM).
- Platform specific bugfixes and improvements
- Work around bug in Sun V5.0 compilers which caused bootstrap
comparison failures on Sparc targets.
- Fix Sparc backend bug which caused aborts in final.c.
- Fix sparc-hal-solaris2* configuration fragments.
- Fix bug in sparc block profiling.
- Fix obscure code generation bug for the PARISC targets.
- Define __STDC_EXT__ for HPUX configurations.
- Various POWERPC64 code generation bugfixes.
- Fix abort for PPC targets using ELF (ex GNU/Linux).
- Fix collect2 problems for AIX targets.
- Correct handling of .file directive for PPC targets.
- Fix bug in fix_trunc x86 patterns.
- Fix x86 port to correctly pop the FP stack for functions that
return structures in memory.
- Fix minor bug in strlen x86 pattern.
- Use stabs debugging instead of dwarf1 for x86-solaris targets.
- Fix template repository code to handle leading underscore
in mangled names.
- Fix weak/weak alias support for OpenBSD.
- GNU/Linux for the ARM has C++ compatible include files.
- Language & Runtime specific fixes.
- Fix handling of constructor attribute in the C front-end
which caused problems building the Chill runtime library
on some targets.
- Fix minor problem merging type qualifiers in the C front-end.
- Fix aliasing bug for pointers and references (C/C++).
- Fix incorrect "non-constant initializer bug" when
-traditional or -fwritable-strings is enabled.
- Fix build error for Chill front-end on SunOS.
- Do not complain about duplicate instantiations when using
-frepo (C++)
- Fix array bounds handling in C++ front-end which caused
problems with dwarf debugging information in some circumstances.
- Fix minor namespace problem.
- Fix problem linking java programs.
The whole suite has been extensively
regression tested
and package tested. It should be reliable
and suitable for widespread use.
The GCC 2.95 release has several new optimizations, new targets, new
languages and other new features as compared to EGCS 1.1 or GCC 2.8. See
the new features page for a more complete
list of new features found in the GCC 2.95 releases.
The sources include installation instructions in both HTML
and plaintext forms in the install
directory in the distribution.
However, the most up to date
installation instructions
and build/test status are on the web pages. We
will update those pages as new information becomes available.
The GCC developers would like to thank the numerous people that
have contributed new features, test results, bugfixes, etc to GCC. This
amazing group of volunteers is
what makes GCC successful.
And finally, we can't in good conscience fail to mention some
caveats to using GCC 2.95.2.
Download GCC 2.95.2 from the
GNU FTP server (ftp://ftp.gnu.org)
Download GCC 2.95.2 from the
GCC/EGCS FTP server (ftp://gcc.gnu.org)
Find a GNU mirror site
Find a GCC/EGCS mirror site
For additional information about GCC please see the
GCC project web server or contact the
GCC development mailing list.