I work at Red Hat on GCC, the GNU Compiler Collection, and I spent most of the past year making GCC easier to use. Let’s look at C and C++ improvements that will be in the next major release of GCC, GCC 9.
Continue reading “Usability improvements in GCC 9”
There has been a lot of work to improve C/C++ compilers in recent years. A number of articles have been posted by Red Hat engineers working on the compilers themselves covering usability improvements, features to detect possible bugs, and security issues in your code.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 Beta ships with GCC 8 as the default compiler. This article shows you how to install GCC 8 as well as Clang/LLVM 6 on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7. You’ll be able to use the same updated (and supported) compilers from Red Hat on both RHEL 7 and 8.
If you want your default gcc to always be GCC 8, or you want clang to always be in your path, this article shows how to permanently enable a software collection by adding it to the profile (dot files) for your user account. A number of common questions about software collections are also answered.
Continue reading “How to install GCC 8 and Clang/LLVM 6 on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7”
A newer version of this article is available: How to install GCC 8 and Clang/LLVM 6 on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.
If you are developing with C/C++, Clang tools and newer versions of GCC can be quite helpful for checking your code and giving you better warnings and error messages to help avoid bugs. The newer compilers have better optimizations and code generation.
You can easily install the latest-supported Clang and GCC compilers for C, C++, Objective-C, and FORTRAN using yum on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. These compilers are available as software collections that are typically updated twice a year. The May 2018 update included Clang/LLVM 5 and GCC 7.3, as well as Go and Rust.
If you want your default gcc to always be GCC 7, or you want clang to always be in your path, this article shows how to permanently enable a software collection by adding it to the profile (dot files) for your user account. A number of common questions about software collections are also answered.
Continue reading “How to install Clang/LLVM 5 and GCC 7 on RHEL”
The Summer 2018 ISO C++ standards committee meeting this year was back in Rapperswil, Switzerland. The new features for C++2a are coming fast now; the Core language working group had very little time for issue processing because of all the proposal papers coming to us from the Evolution working group.
Red Hat sent three of us to the meeting, to cover different tracks: myself (Core), Jonathan Wakely (Library), and Torvald Riegel (Parallelism/Concurrency). Overall, I thought the meeting was very successful; we made significant progress in a lot of areas.
New C++ language features that were accepted at this meeting:
Continue reading “June 2018 ISO C++ Meeting Trip Report (Core Language)”
Continuing in the effort to detect common programming errors, the just-released GCC 8 contains a number of new warnings as well as enhancements to existing checkers to help find non-obvious bugs in C and C++ code. This article focuses on those that deal with inadvertent string truncation and discusses some of the approaches for avoiding the underlying problems. If you haven’t read it, you might also want to read David Malcolm’s article Usability improvements in GCC 8.
To use GCC 8 on RHEL, see How to install GCC 8 and Clang/LLVM 6 on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7. GCC 8 is the default compiler in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 Beta.
It is well-known why buffer overflow is dangerous: writing past the end of an object can overwrite data in adjacent storage, resulting in data corruption. In the most benign cases, the corruption can simply lead to incorrect behavior of the program. If the adjacent data is an address in the executable text segment, the corruption may be exploitable to gain control of the affected process, which can lead to a security vulnerability. (See CWE-119 for more on buffer overflow.)
Continue reading “Detecting String Truncation with GCC 8”
The March C++ ISO Standard meeting this year was back in Jacksonville, Florida. As usual, Red Hat sent three of us to the meeting: Torvald Riegel, Thomas Rodgers, and myself. Jonathan Wakely attended via speakerphone. There were 121 people attending the plenary meeting at the beginning of the week.
This meeting was mostly about new features for C++20, particularly when and how to merge Technical Specifications into the draft standard. In the core language, the ones trying to make C++20 are Concepts (already partially merged), Coroutines, and Modules. There was a lot of discussion around all three.
Continue reading “March 2018 ISO C++ Meeting Trip Report (Core Language)”
The GNU Toolchain is a collection of programming tools produced by the GNU Project. The tools are often packaged together due to their common use for developing software applications, operating systems, and low-level software for embedded systems.
This blog is part of a series (see: Fall 2017 Update) covering the latest changes and improvements in the components that make up this Toolchain. Apart from the announcement of new releases, the features described here are at the bleeding edge of software development in the tools. This means that it may be awhile before they make it into production releases, and they might not be fully functional yet. But anyone who is interested in experimenting with them can build their own copy of the Toolchain and then try them out.
Continue reading “GNU Toolchain Update – Spring 2018”
Did you know that when you compile your C or C++ programs, GCC will not enable all exceptions by default? Do you know which build flags you need to specify in order to obtain the same level of security hardening that GNU/Linux distributions use (such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora)? This article walks through a list of recommended build flags.
The GNU-based toolchain in Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora (consisting of GCC programs such as gcc, g++, and Binutils programs such as as and ld) are very close to upstream defaults in terms of build flags. For historical reasons, the GCC and Binutils upstream projects do not enable optimization or any security hardening by default. While some aspects of the default settings can be changed when building GCC and Binutils from source, the toolchain we supply in our RPM builds does not do this. We only align the architecture selection to the minimum architecture level required by the distribution.
Consequently, developers need to pay attention to build flags, and manage them according to the needs of their project for optimization, level of warning and error detection, and security hardening.
Continue reading “Recommended compiler and linker flags for GCC”
I work at Red Hat on GCC, the GNU Compiler Collection.
My main focus for the last year has been on making GCC easier to use, so I thought I’d write about some of the C and C++ improvements I’ve made that are in the next major release of GCC, GCC 8. You can easily install GCC 8 on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 and 7 using Red Hat Developer Toolset (DTS). GCC 8 is the default compiler in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 Beta. GCC 8 is also available in Fedora 28 and later.
Continue reading “Usability improvements in GCC 8”
