On 11-01-16 21:50, Kenneth Hoste wrote: > ** GCC 4.9.3 vs GCC 5.3.0 ** > > The question here is if we stay with the latest release of GCC v4.x, > which as it happens is still the same version as the one included in the > 2015b toolchains, or if we make the jump to GCC 5.x. > > My personal feeling is that it's (still) too early to jump to GCC 5.x, > and that we should stick to GCC 4.9.3 for the time being. > > The main reasons for this are that several Linux distributions are yet > to pick up GCC 5.x as the main system compiler, and thus that there are > many unknown issues that are bound to pop up left and right, and that > the latest release of the Intel compilers is known not to be fully > compatible yet with GCC 5.x (cfr. [4]).
I feel adventurous and would suggest that we do move to GCC 5. The major issues are the new ABI of libstdc++ and that it defaults to c++11. If we stick the default to c++98 and avoid the ( -D_GLIBCXX_USE_CXX11_ABI=0) we should be fine. Maybe some poorly written build systems will assume that the major GCC version is always 4 but as GCC already did a couple of major version bumps, I think it will be a minor issue. > * GCC version in foss vs intel > > With the GCCcore concept that was introduced in EasyBuild v2.5.0, it is > possible to use a common GCC version as a base for both the foss and > intel toolchains (e.g. 4.9.3), while using a different GCC version in > foss (e.g. 5.3.0). What future do we see for GCCcore? I would keep it fixed at 4.9.3 for quite some time in the future. As it is a base compiler, it not a big deal that it's not the latest and greatest version? Ward
