highlights from: http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.6/changes.html
GCC now has stricter checks for invalid command-line options
New -Wunused-but-set-variable and -Wunused-but-set-parameter
warnings
Many platforms have been obsoleted
Link-time optimization improvements
A new switch -fstack-usage has been added
A new function attribute leaf was introduced
A new warning, enabled by -Wdouble-promotion
Support for selectively enabling and disabling warnings via
#pragma GCC diagnostic has been added
There is now experimental support for some features from the
upcoming C1X revision of the ISO C standard
Improved experimental support for the upcoming C++0x ISO C++
standard
G++ now issues clearer diagnostics in several cases
Updates for ARM, x86, MIPS, PPC/PPC64, SPARC
Darwin, FreeBSD, Solaris 2, MinGW and Cygwin now all support
__float128 on 32-bit and 64-bit x86 targets. [*1]
highlights from: http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.7/changes.html
The -fconserve-space flag has been deprecated
Support for a new parameter --param case-values-threshold=n
was added
Interprocedural and Link-time optimization improvements
A new built-in, __builtin_assume_aligned, has been added
A new warning option -Wunused-local-typedefs was added
A new experimental command-line option -ftrack-macro-expansion
was added
Support for atomic operations specifying the C++11/C11 memory
model has been added
There is support for some more features from the C11 revision
of the ISO C standard
Improved experimental support for the new ISO C++ standard,
C++11
Updates for ARM, x86, MIPS, PPC/PPC64, SH, SPARC, TILE*
A new option (-grecord-gcc-switches) was added
highlights from: http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.8/changes.html
GCC now uses C++ as its implementation language. This means
that to build GCC from sources, you will need a C++
compiler that understands C++ 2003
DWARF4 is now the default when generating DWARF debug
information
A new general optimization level, -Og, has been introduced
A new option -ftree-partial-pre was added
The option -fconserve-space has been removed
The command-line options -fipa-struct-reorg and
-fipa-matrix-reorg have been removed
Interprocedural and Link-time optimization improvements
AddressSanitizer, a fast memory error detector, has been
added [*2]
A new -Wsizeof-pointer-memaccess warning has been added
G++ now supports a -std=c++1y option for experimentation
with features proposed for the next revision of the
standard, expected around 2014
Improved experimental support for the new ISO C++ standard,
C++11
A new port has been added to support AArch64
Updates for ARM, x86, MIPS, PPC/PPC64, SH, SPARC, TILE*
[*1] we should support this too!
[*2] we should look into this.
https://code.google.com/p/address-sanitizer/
mrg