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.

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.