Effective immediately, the developers of the GNU Compiler Collection have decided to allow the use of some C++ language constructs within the source code of the GCC

"Programming languages are like sharks. When they stop moving forward, they die. Scheme has never stopped moving — not completely. It's been more of a moving target than a fixed language. Scheme is a 'dynamic language' in more ways than one. The purpose of this article is to explain the position of the Scheme Language Steering Committee: ..."

A compiler is software that transforms source code written in a computer language (the source language) into another computer language (the target language, often having a binary form known as object code).

Yesterday on the mailing list for GCC is was brought up if Apple's Objective-C 2.0 patches for the GNU Compiler Collection could be merged back into the upstream GCC code-base as maintained by the Free Software Foundation.

"...To do this, Mallavarapu used the programming language LISP, a language widely used in artificial intelligence research.

"Over the last couple days, I implemented a generic tower of compilers in Guile.So for example, you have Scheme as a source language, which defines a compiler to GHIL (a scheme-like intermediate language, simpler and without macros), which defines a compiler to GLIL (a lower-level language), which defines a compiler to object code (the byte sequence of VM code)..." -- see also

Last week GCC 4.5.0 entered the world with improvements. Over the weekend we decided to benchmark this major update to the GNU Compiler Collection to see how its performance compares to that of GCC 4.3 and 4.4.

In the last few years, the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) has undergone a major transition from GCC version 3 to version 4. With GCC 4 comes a new optimization framework (and new intermediate code representation), new target and language support, and a variety of new attributes and options.

Florian Effenberger has been a Free Software evangelist for many years. Pro bono, he is founding member and part of the Steering Committee at The Document Foundation. He has previously been active in the OpenOffice.org project for seven years, most recently as Marketing Project Lead.