At Red Hat, we take pride in the fact that we actively contribute to the projects that are used to build our set of leading enterprise solutions. And when one project’s community is distinguished for their exemplary efforts – we want to recognize them as well.

As such, we are pleased to announce that the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) has received the Association for Computing Machinery’s (ACM) 2014 Programming Languages Software Award. Awarded to an institution or individuals that have developed a software system with lasting influence, the award recognizes GCC’s 27 years of success and the substantial impact it has had on the software industry, an example of which is its importance to modern datacenter operations.

Not only is GCC a key component of Red Hat Enterprise Linux...

it’s used in the creation of the platform itself. Given the importance of GCC to Red Hat, we, along with many of our partners and customers, actively contribute to the GCC community upstream, always striving for improvements that can benefit both the community as well as our customers and partners.

Red Hat GCC engineer Nick Clifton attended the award ceremony at PLDI in Edinburgh, UK and accepted the award on behalf of the GCC community together with GCC Steering Committee representative David Edelsohn of IBM. The physical award was then presented to the community-at-large at the GNU Tools Cauldron event in Cambridge, UK, on Saturday, July 19, 2014. The award includes a prize of $2,500 which we’re pleased to confirm is being donated to the Free Software Foundation to help foster the continued evolution of the free software ecosystem.

While Red Hat contributes actively to the GCC project, the ultimate success of GCC comes from the entire community’s dedication and innovation within the project itself. So congratulations, GCC – you’ve earned this!

If you’re interested in joining or contributing to the GCC community, please visit http://gcc.gnu.org to learn more.