Red Hat Developer

How to install Clang/LLVM 5 and GCC 7 on RHEL

rctkv
By Rob Terzi

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.

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-Wimplicit-fallthrough in GCC 7

rhpolacek
By Marek Polacek

(See this article to install GCC 7 on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.)

In C and C++, the cases of a switch statement are in fact labels, and the switch is essentially a go to that jumps to the desired label. Since labels do not change the flow of control, one case block falls through to the following case block, unless terminated by a return, a break, a no return call or similar. In the example below, “case 1” falls through to “case 2“:

switch (cond)
   {
   case 1:
     a = 1;
   case 2:
     a = 2;
     break;
   /* ... */
   }

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Memory Error Detection Using GCC

msebor
By Martin Sebor

Introduction

GCC has a rich set of features designed to help detect many kinds of programming errors. Of particular interest are those that corrupt the memory of a running program and, in some cases, makes it vulnerable to security threats. Since 2006, GCC has provided a solution to detect and prevent a subset of buffer overflows in C and C++ programs. Although it is based on compiler technology, it’s best known under the name Fortify Source derived from the synonymous GNU C Library macro that controls the feature: _FORTIFY_SOURCE. GCC has changed and improved considerably since its 4.1 release in 2006, and with its ability to detect these sorts of errors. GCC 7, in particular, contains a number of enhancements that help detect several new kinds of programming errors in this area. This article provides a brief overview of these new features. For a comprehensive list of all major improvements in GCC 7, please see GCC 7 Changes document.

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