Thank you, that's a great reply to his comment. My first impression of his comment was that the kernel project shouldn't chase the latest-and-best compiler releases -- or similarly the most recent C language changes; rather, a boring-technology approach is sensible for such a foundational project as Linux. I see your point, though, that GCC is simple to upgrade. (If I were making the tech decision here, I'd want to ensure that newer GCC's didn't introduce features that I thought were too risky for my project, or at least that I could disable/restrict those features with flags.)
GCC 5.1 (released in 2015) is hardly latest-and-best, though: moving the version bar up only very slowly and with an eye to what distros are using as their compiler version is a pretty solid boring-technology approach, in my view.
