GPLv3 - Credit: fsf.org

The GCC Runtine Library has a new license exception that will allow GCC to be licensed under the GPLv3.

BOSTON, Massachusetts, USA — Tuesday, January 27, 2009 — Today the Free Software Foundation (FSF), together with the GCC Steering Committee and the Software Freedom Law Center, announced the release of a new GCC Runtime Library Exception. This license exception will allow the entire GCC codebase to be upgraded to GPLv3, and enable the development of a plugin framework for GCC.

“GCC includes runtime libraries that are automatically built into all the object code that GCC creates,” explained Brett Smith, license compliance engineer at the FSF. “Because we decided a long time ago to allow developers to compile proprietary software with GCC, these libraries have always had license exceptions. This way, programs that are merely compiled with GCC don’t have to be released under the GPL.”

I didn’t realize GCC wasn’t under the GPLv3.

• FSF

Python

Python 3.0 has been released.

Python 3.0 (a.k.a. “Python 3000″ or “Py3k”) is a new version of the language that is incompatible with the 2.x line of releases. The language is mostly the same, but many details, especially how built-in objects like dictionaries and strings work, have changed considerably, and a lot of deprecated features have finally been removed. Also, the standard library has been reorganized in a few prominent places.

I’m not really sure how I feel about the changes.

• Python
• Slashdot

LTO - Credit: http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/

Google has begun working on a module of gcc that will help it optimize over the whole program, not just over single files.  This can already be done, but WHOPR adds scalability for arbitrarily large programs.

At Google, we deal with several massively large applications, so we are working on a scalable alternative to traditional LTO called WHOPR (WHOle Program optimizeR), which introduces parallelism and distribution to be able to handle arbitrarily large programs. The basic observation is that to do many whole program optimizations, the compiler rarely needs to have all the functions loaded in memory, and final code generation can be parallelized by partitioning the program into independent sets.

A vast majority of free software is compiled using GCC, so while not many programs may be able to benefit from WHOPR, anything that keeps GCC ahead is good news.  If you notice, Google even seems to be doing this directly in GCC space, not coding this up in Google Code and bringing it over later.

• Google Open Source Blog
• WHOPR GCC Page

Python

Python 2.6 has been released.  This is an important step in migrating to the (not backwards compatible Python 3.0).

The Python community has worked very hard to minimize the disruptive impact of the transition and make it more seamless and natural. The 2.6 release is a very important part of that strategy because it provides a crucial stepping stone for the migration of existing code. Python 2.6 provides backwards compatibility with the 2.0 series but also includes many features that have been backported from Python 3.0. Additional 3.0 features can be toggled individually by importing from future_builtins and using various flags at the command line. Python 2.6 also emits warnings when it detects the use of deprecated functionality that will not be supported in 3.0. This approach will make it possible for third-party developers to shift applications and libraries over to 3.0 incrementally and with minimal breakage.

I’m not looking forwards to 3.0’s default floating point division, but I’m still happy to see Python progress.

• Ars Technica
• Python

Red Hat’s IcedTea passed all the TCK tests, making it the first fully working/free implementation of java.

This week the IcedTea Project reached an important milestone – The latest OpenJDK binary included in Fedora 9 (x86 and x86_64) passes the rigorous Java Test Compatibility Kit (TCK). This means that it provides all the required Java APIs and behaves like any other Java SE 6 implementation – in keeping with the portability goal of the Java platform. As of writing, Fedora 9 is the only operating system to include a free and open Java SE 6 implementation that has passed the Java TCK. All of the code that makes this possible has been made available to the IcedTea project so everyone can benefit from the work.

The Java TCK is a complex suite of tools and documentation that verifies that Java implementations conform to the Java specification. It consists of more than 80,000 tests and over 1 million lines of code.

Too bad java is still so slow.

• Rich Sharple’s Blog
• Truth Happens

Version 4.3.1 of the Gnu C Compiler has been released.  This is a bug-fix release that fixes regressions in 4.3.0.

GCC 4.3.1 has been released.

GCC 4.3.1 is a bug-fix release, containing fixes for regressions in GCC 4.3.0 relative to previous GCC releases.

See: http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.3/changes.html and particularly http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.3/changes.html#4.3.1 for more information about changes in GCC 4.3.1.

Something of note from Kernel Trap: there are no benchmarks for the 4.3 release series and commenters have suggested that GCC has gotten so slow that they are embarrassed by their benchmarks.  I hate to think that this is the case.

• GCC Mailing List
• Kernel Trap