
GCC 7.1 Released - edelsohn
https://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2017-05/msg00017.html
======
gigatexal
"The C++ frontend now has experimental support for ALL (emphasis added) of the
current C++17 draft, with the -std=c++1z and -std=gnu++1z options, and the
libstdc++ library has most of the C++17 draft library features implemented
too.

The Address Sanitizer can now report uses of variables after leaving their
scope. GCC now can be configured for OpenMP 4.5 offloading to NVidia PTX
GPGPUs."

The above are some really intriguing nuggets, I will have to check this out
this weekend.

------
gumby
Did I overlook gcc 7.0??

~~~
edelsohn
New releases start with .1; .0 corresponds to the release candidate.

~~~
Sharlin
It's an interesting convention but on the other hand makes quite explicit the
common wisdom that "point-oh" releases are rarely production quality.

------
goalieca
That's wonderful news. But here I am stuck on the latest centos running 4.8.
They haven't even made the switch to abi breaking 5.0

~~~
bandrami
Then that's wonderful news to you: your long-release-cycle OS insulates you
from every single worry about this update. This is why distributions like
CentOS and Debian Stable exist.

(I just realized that might sound sarcastic to The Kids These Days, but it's
100% serious: that's the whole point of these long-term distributions, and
those of us who have to manage large numbers of systems love it.)

~~~
yzmtf2008
... which in turn resulted in TensorFlow not being able to be used in clusters
for a long, long time:
[https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/issues/110](https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/issues/110)

~~~
bandrami
Which was the point. That was a long, long list of TensorFlow bugs that were
avoided.

~~~
xorcist
I just want to add to that, just to offer a perspective that people not
concerned with the upkeep of software always realize: In the general case,
when you keep software around for long some bugs will linger. But as long as
the issues are well known that's not necessarily a bad thing.

Sometimes you have to work around some corner case or performance anomaly in
another layer. You don't want to apply fixes to underlying software willy-
nilly without first re-evaluating what you did.

So sometimes stable distributions will avoid fixing bugs for good reason.
(That doesn't go for security issues, of course.) And if that's not what you
want most distributions have a more suitable branch for you.

~~~
bandrami
> most distributions have a more suitable branch for you

Exactly. CentOS has Fedora, Debian has sid/ubuntu/derivatives, Slackware has
-current. If you don't require a stable platform (and most _developers_ don't)
then you're welcome to join people on the unstable side of things, making the
next stable side of things.

~~~
yzmtf2008
The problem is most of the time developers working with clusters do _not_ have
control of which distribution to use. TensorFlow was considered stable (or at
least stable enough for research) for a long time before it can be used with
glibc 2.12.

