GNU toolchain 2025 in year review

[GNU Tools weekly]

GNU toolchain 2025 in year review

As we step into 2026, here is a review of all of the exciting things
that happened in 2025 in the GNU toolchain.
Sorry if I miss something out, I might have just forgotten about it
since there was so much that happened in the last year.

Releases this year:
 * GCC: 15.1.0, 15.2.0, 14.3.0, 13.4.0 and 12.5.0 (the last one of GCC 12)
 * binutils: 2.44, 2.45 and 2.45.1
 * gdb: 16.1, 16.2, 16.3 and 17.1
 * glibc: 2.41 and 2.42

Conferences this year:
 * GNU Tools Cauldron 2025
 * GCC developer room at FOSDEM 2025

Sourceware changes:
 * Improvements to forge
 * sourceware.org moving to new HW and new co-location
 * Many changes/improvement happened to mitigate AI/LLM bot scraper bots
  * Include recent change to git over https

GCC:
 * MAINTAINERs news
  * Richard Sandiford and Marcus Shawcroft stepped down as aarch64 maintainers
  * aarch64 gained 1 new maintainer and 4 new reviewers
  * autovectorization gained 1 new maintainer and 1 new reviewer
  * C++ front-end gained 1 new reviewer
  * The forge integrator is an official maintainer position
 * 9525 commits to the trunk
  * 411 different authors (by names)
  * 154 different (email) domain
  * 1056 commits to rust front-end
  * 857 commits to C++ front-end
  * 933 commits to Ada front-end and runtime
  * 565 commits to Fortran front-end
  * 1073 commits to libstdc++ (C++ runtime/library)
  * 84 commits to Fortran runtime
  * 418 commits to riscv backend
  * 319 commits to aarch64 backend
  * 314 commits to x86 backend
  * 385 commits to the vectorizer
  * 79 commits to match-and-simplify
  * 91 commits to analyzer
* 2 new front-ends
  * Algol68 (will be included in GCC 16)
   * cobol (released in GCC 15)
 * C++ defaults to C++20
 * Many C++23 and C++26 features implemented
 * Rewrite of the analyzer's supergraph
 * New optimization for openmp: Copy prop into openmp outlined functions
 * Major improvement to early break/exit auto-vectorization
 * Improvements to AutoFDO; aarch64 support and more
 * Improvements and fixes for function multi-versioning; support for
aarch64 and riscv
 * Removal of fold_all_builtins pass
 * A simple copy prop for aggregates was added
 * Improved tail recursion with aggregate arguments
 * libdiagnostics gained many improvements
 * rustc_codegen_gcc (rustc using libjit) is able to compile many
things including std library
 * LoongArch32 support
 * _BitInt support for s390 and LoongArch
 * inline-asm support for supplying hard register # instead of just constraints
 * Add dep_fusion RTL pass
 * documentation snapshots happen not just daily
 * Bugzilla: +778 issues
  * 5091 new issues opened
  * 4313 issues closed

glibc:
 * Able to compile with clang
 * Improvements to math library (libm and libmvec)
 * sframe support
 * malloc improvements
 * termio.h header has been removed
 * 1409 commits to the trunk
  * 117 different authors (by names)
  * 61 different (email) domain
 * Bugzilla: +42 issues
  * 253 new issues opened
  * 211 issues closed

gdb/binutils:
 *  3990 commits to the trunk
  * 191 different authors (by names)
  * 105 different (email) domain
 * gdb Bugzilla: +98 issues
  * 418 new issues opened
  * 320 issues closed
 * binutils Bugzilla: +62 issues
  * 394 new issues opened
  * 332 issues closed
 * AArch64 Linux Guarded Control Stacks support
 * stabs support was removed from gdb
 * gdb record now supported for rv64gc
 * sframe support in binutils improved
 *