After almost one year of development since the 4.2.0 release, GCC 4.3.0 is available. This is a major release, made up of new functionality that was lacking in the older releases.

GCC is an acronym for GNU Compiler Collection, and includes front ends for C, C++, Objective-C, Fortran, Java and Ada, with their necessary libraries like libgcj or libstdc++. The collection needs the GMP and MPFR libraries to build all the front-end languages it supports.

Here's a short list with the most important changes and new features included in this release:

• ColdFire targets now treat long double as having the same format as double. In earlier versions of GCC, they used the 68881 long double format instead.
• The m68k-uclinux target now uses the same calling conventions as m68k-linux-gnu. You can select the original calling conventions by configuring for m68k-uclinuxoldabi instead. Note that m68k-uclinuxoldabi also retains the original 80-bit long double on ColdFire targets.
• The -fforce-mem option has been removed because it has had no effect in the last few GCC releases.
• The i386 -msvr3-shlib option has been removed since it is no longer used.
• Fastcall for i386 has been changed not to pass aggregate arguments in registers, following Microsoft compilers.
• Support for the AOF assembler has been removed from the ARM back end; this affects only the targets arm-semi-aof and armel-semi-aof, which are no longer recognized. We removed these targets without a deprecation period because it was discovered that they have been unusable since GCC 4.0.0.
• Support for the TMS320C3x/C4x processor (targets c4x-* and tic4x-*) has been removed. This support had been deprecated since GCC 4.0.0.

The GCC ports for some various operating systems were declared obsolete, for example those for BeOS, kaOS, Solaris versions that predate Solaris 7, WindISS and GNU/Linux using the a.out object format. The GCC middle-end is now integrated with the MPFR library, thus allowing GCC to evaluate and replace at compile-time calls to built-in math functions that have constant arguments with their mathematically equivalent results.

You can read more in the official GCC 4.3.0 changelog.

Download GCC 4.3.0 right now from Softpedia.