According to the chatbot here, the Pico SDK does not need a cross compiler when developing on a Raspberry Pi because they are ARM processors and the ARM gcc knows how to create code for all of the different ARM versions.Indeed. You could perhaps report the locked thread and get it re-opened. But what I was going to write there was ...By the way, the other post you locked as duplicate, about the Pico SDK and gcc 15, appropriately posted in the Pico section where the subject matter is the Pico, is technically not a duplicate. I do not want to install gcc on a Pico.
Pico SDK uses two GCC compilers, a cross-compiler to generate Pico executables, and the native Pi GCC compiler which is used to build some native utilities, 'pioasm' and 'picotool', maybe others. It would be whether those are adversely affected by an upgrade to GCC 15 which matters.
There have been issues with GCC 15 - https://github.com/raspberrypi/pico-sdk/issues/2448 - and I don't know what's been fixed and not.
If you can install GCC 15 alongside the existing you can probably keep Pico SDK builds using the older GCC while allowing GCC 15 to be used elsewhere. I wouldn't know how to do that.
If that's not wrong, then compiling a new GCC for the SDK is no different than the native compiler.
Statistics: Posted by ejolson — Mon Feb 16, 2026 7:13 pm