The GNU Compiler Collection has had a fairly busy 2017 so far. Today, David Edelsohn, CTO of GCC technology at IBM, announced that the GCC steering committee will add a RISC-V port of the collection somewhere in the 7.x release timeframe.

Last week, the project announced that it is fully C++17 compatible. All planned C++17 features will be supported in GCC 7. Some of those features are even supported in older versions of the compiler collection.

(Related: A change in priorities for the Free Software Foundation)

The new hexadecimal floating literals for C++, for example, are supported all the way back to GCC 3. On the other hand, other features, such as construction rules for enum class variables and dynamic memory allocation for over-aligned data, will only be supported in the 7.x line and beyond.

The Clang static analyzer project is also coming along, and has added extensive support for C++17. That project still has a few features to implement, such as template argument deduction for class templates.

On the RISC-V side of the GCC fence, Palmer Dabbelt, Ph.D. student at UC Berkeley, and Andrew Waterman, cofounder and chief engineer at SiFive, will head the RISC-V GCC port. SiFive is the company behind the effort to build RISC-V, an open-source processor specification.