Version 13.3.0-1 is a new release; it follows the official GNU GCC release.

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

There are separate binaries for Windows (Intel 64-bit), macOS (Intel 64-bit, Apple Silicon 64-bit) and GNU/Linux (Intel 64-bit, Arm 32/64-bit).

Download

The binary files are available from GitHub Releases.

Prerequisites

  • GNU/Linux Intel 64-bit: any system with GLIBC 2.27 or higher (like Ubuntu 18 or later, Debian 10 or later, RedHat 8 or later, Fedora 29 or later, etc)
  • GNU/Linux Arm 32/64-bit: any system with GLIBC 2.27 or higher (like Raspberry Pi OS, Ubuntu 18 or later, Debian 10 or later, RedHat 8 or later, Fedora 29 or later, etc)
  • Intel Windows 64-bit: Windows 7 with the Universal C Runtime (UCRT), Windows 8, Windows 10
  • Intel macOS 64-bit: 10.13 or later
  • Apple Silicon macOS 64-bit: 11.6 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 development dependency for a project is quite easy:

cd my-project
xpm init # Add a package.json if not already present

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

ls -l xpacks/.bin

To install this specific version, use:

xpm install @xpack-dev-tools/gcc@13.3.0-1.1 --verbose

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 created by xpm in the current project:

cd my-project

xpm uninstall @xpack-dev-tools/gcc

To completely remove the package from the central xPack 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 13.3.0 from May 21, 2024;
  • binutils version 2.42 from Jan 29, 2024.

Supported languages

The supported languages are:

  • C
  • C++
  • Obj-C
  • Obj-C++
  • Fortran

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

Starting with 12.2.0-2, support for 32-bit multilib was added on Intel Linux; it can be enabled via the -m32 compile option.

Changes

Compared to the upstream, there are no functional changes.

Bug fixes

  • none

Enhancements

  • none

Known problems

Please see the separate tests results page.

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.

@rpath and @loader_path

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

Documentation

To save space and bandwidth, the original GNU GCC documentation is available online.

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.

For the prerequisites and more details on the build procedure, please see the How to build 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:

05a48fb89e0564b5c1fc35a98ff13cf5bd24161c6713dca1812d61153c810804
xpack-gcc-13.3.0-1-darwin-arm64.tar.gz

83ddd9eb62e25d959beed9739284fbe60e0071946081affa2f9cc6f6b6ac6f63
xpack-gcc-13.3.0-1-darwin-x64.tar.gz

5c1ae72b2dc9ea33ce52e57cdd056767ae9b0481cb057188fb997b0bbdddaddf
xpack-gcc-13.3.0-1-linux-arm.tar.gz

13fd51c70cbaf9109cd758817b93e4db3fbd4b8b543975453701c10ee077fd75
xpack-gcc-13.3.0-1-linux-arm64.tar.gz

deeb1e7eb96e7d633d6af3a09f89f9953d9cc562c3aed7e836a7a81c5e184a85
xpack-gcc-13.3.0-1-linux-x64.tar.gz

9adf1c8c61276d688395ac825e72245f1a92d46dc89df683a5726c50f72a6cc2
xpack-gcc-13.3.0-1-win32-x64.zip

Deprecation notices

Linux minimum requirements

The minimum requirement is GLIBC 2.27, available starting with Ubuntu 18, Debian 10 and RedHat 8. Support for RedHat 7 was dropped in 2022.

32-bit support

Support for 32-bit Intel Linux and Intel Windows was dropped in 2022.

Pre-deprecation notice for 32-bit Arm Linux

Due to the large user base of 32-bit Raspberry Pi systems, support for 32-bit Arm Linux (armv7l) will be preserved for a little while, but expect it to be dropped by 2025, so it is recommended to consider an upgrade to a RPi 4 or 5 with at least 4 GB (preferably 8 GB) of RAM.

Pre-deprecation notice for Ubuntu 18.04

Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Bionic Beaver reached the end of the standard five-year maintenance window for Long-Term Support (LTS) release on 31 May 2023.

As a courtesy, the xPack GNU/Linux releases will continue to be based on Ubuntu 18.04 for another year.

From 2025 onwards, the GNU/Linux binaries will be built on Debian 10, (GLIBC 2.28), and are also expected to run on RedHat 8.

Users are urged to update their build and test infrastructure to ensure a smooth transition to the next xPack releases.

Download analytics

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