GCC is one of the most important open source applications in use today, enabling developers to compile their programs.

With each incremental GCC release, there always seems to be more speed and stability fixes and that looks to be the case with GCC 4.6 as well.

There are a number of link-time optimization improvements including memory usage and intermediate language streaming performance improvements.

"A new general optimization level, -Ofast, has been introduced," the GCC 4.6 release notes state. "It combines the existing optimization level -O3 with options that can affect standards compliance but result in better optimized code. For example, -Ofast enables -ffast-math."

Going a step further datastructures used by the dataflow framework in GCC were reorganized which results in improved compile time.

According to the GCC 4.6 release notes, the compile time of the GCC C compiler binary with link-time optimization went down by over 10 percent.