Version 11.2.0-1 is a new release; it follows the upstream release.

The xPack GCC is a standalone cross-platform binary distribution of GCC.

There are separate binaries for Windows (x64 and x86), macOS (x64) and GNU/Linux (x64 and x86, arm64 and arm).

Download

The binary files are available from GitHub Releases.

Prerequisites

  • x86/x64 GNU/Linux: any system with GLIBC 2.15 or higher (like Ubuntu 12 or later, Debian 8 or later, RedHat/CentOS 7 later, Fedora 20 or later, etc)
  • arm64/arm GNU/Linux: any system with GLIBC 2.23 or higher (like Ubuntu 16 or later, Debian 9 or later, RedHat/CentOS 8 or later, Fedora 24 or later, etc)
  • x86/x64 Windows: Windows 7 with the Universal C Runtime (UCRT), Windows 8, Windows 10
  • x64 macOS: 10.13 or later

Install

The full details of installing the xPack GCC on various platforms are presented in the separate Install page.

Easy install

The easiest way to install GCC is with xpm by using the binary xPack, available as @xpack-dev-tools/gcc from the npmjs.com registry.

With the xpm tool available, installing the latest version of the package and adding it as a dependency for a project is quite easy:

cd my-project
xpm init # Only at first use.

xpm install @xpack-dev-tools/gcc@latest

ls -l xpacks/.bin

To install this specific version, use:

xpm install @xpack-dev-tools/gcc@11.2.0-1.3

It is also possible to install GCC globally, in the user home folder, but this requires xPack aware tools to automatically identify them and manage paths.

xpm install --global @xpack-dev-tools/gcc@latest --verbose

Uninstall

To remove the links from the current project:

cd my-project

xpm uninstall @xpack-dev-tools/gcc

To completely remove the package from the central xPacks store:

xpm uninstall --global @xpack-dev-tools/gcc

Compliance

The xPack GCC generally follows the official GCC releases.

The current version is based on:

  • GCC version 11.2.0 from July 28, 2021.

Supported languages

The supported languages are:

  • C
  • C++
  • Obj-C
  • Obj-C++

Note: Obj-C/C++ support is minimalistic.

Changes

There are no functional changes.

Bug fixes

  • none

Enhancements

  • none

Known problems

  • none

Shared libraries

On all platforms the packages are standalone, and expect only the standard runtime to be present on the host.

All dependencies that are build as shared libraries are copied locally in the libexec folder (or in the same folder as the executable for Windows).

DT_RPATH and LD_LIBRARY_PATH

On GNU/Linux the binaries are adjusted to use a relative path:

$ readelf -d library.so | grep runpath
 0x000000000000001d (RPATH)            Library rpath: [$ORIGIN]

In the GNU ld.so search strategy, the DT_RPATH has the highest priority, higher than LD_LIBRARY_PATH, so if this later one is set in the environment, it should not interfere with the xPack binaries.

Please note that previous versions, up to mid-2020, used DT_RUNPATH, which has a priority lower than LD_LIBRARY_PATH, and does not tolerate setting it in the environment.

@executable_path

Similarly, on macOS, the binaries are adjusted with otool to use a relative path.

Documentation

The original documentation is available in the share/doc folder.

Build

The binaries for all supported platforms (Windows, macOS and GNU/Linux) were built using the xPack Build Box (XBB), a set of build environments based on slightly older distributions, that should be compatible with most recent systems.

The scripts used to build this distribution are in:

  • distro-info/scripts

For the prerequisites and more details on the build procedure, please see the README-MAINTAINER page.

CI tests

Before publishing, a set of simple tests were performed on an exhaustive set of platforms. The results are available from:

Tests

The binaries were tested on a variety of platforms, but mainly to check the integrity of the build, not the compiler functionality.

Checksums

The SHA-256 hashes for the files are:

cdabe99bb9e279da9d1408e2d241ca06e45ff1885f0dd926908288936627d76a
xpack-gcc-11.2.0-1-darwin-x64.tar.gz

aeb550da0f189f9b41acfda980fcef133e78daac805b87ac191eda6d041bb175
xpack-gcc-11.2.0-1-linux-arm.tar.gz

a4209553517c458178502d4ce17552b7d20e1b289f1cfd65d8e0d6315fe50621
xpack-gcc-11.2.0-1-linux-arm64.tar.gz

fa094a10e058286fd2fc61aa926a5601f3c34ec1c7f855bcbc426e1a06bf9880
xpack-gcc-11.2.0-1-linux-ia32.tar.gz

09bc1a8d8d887062a1d1d4668cc21ffa9f5f839a1fff5b29afe40a67bbfb0c5f
xpack-gcc-11.2.0-1-linux-x64.tar.gz

f809cdd31cf5dae2ecdf981264f01cc51767186e27660f924abf84d7d8f18ef7
xpack-gcc-11.2.0-1-win32-ia32.zip

b6b36762c98725e04c862ecbf26b3cb37bdfeb3c4c89d09f1c72bb3ff67176dc
xpack-gcc-11.2.0-1-win32-x64.zip

Deprecation notices

32-bit support

Support for 32-bit x86 GNU/Linux and x86 Windows will most probably be dropped in 2022. Support for 32-bit Arm GNU/Linux will be preserved for a while, due to the large user base of 32-bit Raspberry Pi systems.

GNU/Linux minimum requirements

Support for RedHat 7 will most probably be dropped in 2022, and the minimum requirement will be raised to GLIBC 2.27, available starting with Ubuntu 18 and RedHat 8.

Download analytics

Credit to Shields IO for the badges and to Somsubhra/github-release-stats for the individual file counters.