The 2010, GCC Developer Summit

On October 25th–27th, 2010 this years GCC Developer Summit was held in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.

Even if you don't develop GCC, and just use GCC you might find some of the papers and the proceedings of interest.

For example When smart programmers write bad code. John Regehr had an interesting paper: Exposing Difficult Compilers Bugs With Random Testing.

A couple of papers on Google's Go Language, which I keep wonder how well it could be made to work on Embedded Systems, as it has issues of concurrency designed into the language?

Check out the papers if you are interested in the internals of GCC, where GCC is headed, or how you might improve your own code when you use GCC.

Embedded System Compilers generate dangerous code

Volatiles Are Miscompiled, and What to Do about It by Eric Eide and John Regehr raises some troubling concerns about the tools that form the cornerstone of many Embedded Systems that we depend on daily. They ask the question Why are compilers so buggy? then follow up with several reasons. Mostly due to the badly generated code that involves the C keyword 'volatile'. Code is presented to test and in some cases correct this hidden software danger.