It’s our pleasure to see GCC 3.4 import to be listed in FreeBSD 5.3-R todo list. Unfortunatelly, gmake is now a required prerequisite when building GCC 3.4, this may slow down the import progress.

GCC 3.4 has improved its optimizer a lot. The profile guided optimization now supports file locks and hence it is now possible to profile programs having fork() calls within. Also, there comes several useful parameters to guide the optimization, –param large-function-insns and –param large-function-growth for instance, can limit the size growth of large functions, which brings a balance between unroll-ism and cache hits.

A new option, -fweb, improves the quality of register allocation, at the expense of making debugging hard.

gcc now supports precompiled headers, this will improve C++ compile speed.