From the ‘digging into GCC 4.4‘ files:
GCC 4.4 is a critically important component of the open source software landscape. It officially was released last week and I blogged on it briefly, but felt the need to get more insight. Fedora 11 which hit its preview release yesterday lists GCC 4.4 as one of its key features and Red Hat is a key contributor to GCC, so I asked Red Hat for their views on how GCC 4.4 will make a difference.
Tim Burke, Senior Director, RHEL Product Development told me that in his view the most significant new advancement in gcc 4.4 over gcc
4.3 is OpenMP 3.0 support (gcc 4.3 had OpenMP 2.5 support).
Burke explained that, the significant
feature in OpenMP version 3.0 is the concept of tasks. One can specify
whole sections of their code as separate tasks that can be run in
parallel. (OpenMP 3.0 specifications can be found here:
http://www.openmp.org/mp-documents/spec30.pdf and a good overview of the OpenMP standard can be found here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Openmp).
“OpenMP allows
programmers to more easily create efficient multi-threaded programs in
C/C++,” Burke explained. “With OpenMP 3.0 the user can explicitly section off code they
wish to run in parallel”
So what’s next for GCC from Red Hat’s point of view?