Features/GCC4.3

= Move to GCC 4.3 =

Summary
Update gcc in Fedora 9 to 4.3.x

Owner

 * Name: JakubJelinek

Current status

 * Targeted release: Fedora 9
 * Last updated: 2008-03-12
 * Percentage of completion: 100%

Detailed Description
GCC 4.3.0 has been released on 2008-03-05 and is included in F9 beta as the primary compiler, most of the packages have been successfully rebuilt. For more information see http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.3/index.html

Benefit to Fedora
Lots of new optimizations, experimental C++0x support (variadic templates, decltype, static assertions, right angle brackets, ...), parallel mode for STL, substantial Fortran improvements, but most importantly an actively maintained compiler by upstream. GCC 4.1.x served us well for a bunch of Fedora releases, but it is not really maintained upstream any more. GCC 4.2.x has lots of issues, e.g. with performance of generated code, and many of its new features such as OpenMP 2.5 support were backported to 4.1.x-RH anyway, so we want to skip it directly to 4.3.

Scope
Initially build packages with GCC 4.3 prerelease in a separate component, with separate buildroots, once stable enough to switch it will be moved over to dist-f9. Later on we'll need a full mass rebuild.

Test Plan
Mass rebuild will be an important test and then of course all package testing will be testing the correctness of the generated code as well.

Dependencies
None.

Contingency Plan
Fix important GCC bugs, once rawhide switches to GCC 4.3, backing out to GCC 4.1 would be really hard.

Documentation

 * For details see http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.3/changes.html
 * See also http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.3/porting_to.html

Release Notes
No release notes for GCC needed.

KarstenWade: -1 ... there has been a beat for GCC for a very long time, and if there are changes between releases (such as a new GCC):  i/Docs/Beats/Devel/Tools/GCC