Recipe for baking a GCC: Ingredients and community of the GNU Compiler Collection, 2025

This presentation explores the essential “ingredients” that make up GCC: source code, external dependencies, project infrastructure, development tools, and most importantly the community around it: how we organize and operate, in order to maintain the many pieces that comprise this decades-old-yet-modern compiler and related tools. Rounded off with some recent updates, including GPU code offloading, GCC/Rust, and GCC/BPF.

Thomas Schwinge

Thomas Schwinge

Baylibre

Software engineer, primarily working on GCC (GNU Compiler Collection), in particular adding support for OpenACC/OpenMP (directive-based parallel programming models) with code offloading to Nvidia GPUs (project started in 2013-06), and AMD GPUs. In 2018-09, appointed GCC/OpenACC maintainer, in 2023-07 appointed GCC/nvptx maintainer. Active member of the OpenACC Technical Committee.

Part of the team developing GCC/Rust: a GCC front end for the Rust programming language.

I also worked on glibc, GDB, binutils, etc., and had a brief look into the world of LLVM, but GCC etc. is still keeping me busy.

Employed by BayLibre.

Background in electrical engineering, focus on computer engineering, graduating from the Universität Stuttgart with a Diplom-Ingenieur (Dipl.-Ing., compare to M.Eng.) degree.