Post Syndicated from original https://lwn.net/Articles/894149/

The GCC project has made the first release of the GCC 12 series, GCC 12.1. As the announcement notes, this month is the 35th anniversary of the GCC 1.0 release. There are lots of changes and fixes in this release, including:

This release deprecates support for the STABS debugging format and
introduces support for the CTF debugging format. The C and C++
frontends continue to advance with extending support for features
in the upcoming C2X and C++23 standards and the C++ standard library
improves support for the experimental C++20 and C++23 parts.
The Fortran frontend now fully supports TS 29113 for interoperability with C.

[…] On the security side GCC can now initialize stack variables implicitly
using -ftrivial-auto-var-init to help tracking down and mitigating
uninitialized stack variable flaws. The C and C++ frontends now support
__builtin_dynamic_object_size compatible with the clang extension.
The x86 backend gained mitigations against straight line speculation
with -mharden-sls. The experimental Static Analyzer gained uninitialized
variable use detection and many other improvements.