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https://pkgs.alpinelinux.org/packages?name=gcc&branch=edge

Huh... do I need to configure it to use edge? I seem to recall not seeing it in the package manager.

You can add channels to /etc/apk/repositories

alpine 3.8 (and 3.7) branch have gcc-6.4 which was released in July 2017. For a C compiler, that is absolutely sufficient. You'll find many other packages in the 3.8 release branch are more up-to-date, this is a bit of an exception.

This isn't Rust. GCC-6.4 will compile literally any C or C++ project you find (that works with any recent version of GCC), including stuff requiring C++-14 and _most_ of C++-17. Hell, GCC-4.9 (from 2014) is sufficient to compile the latest linux kernel, the latest sqlite3, the latest nginx, the latest of any real significant package.

That was actually a special case if I understood correctly. gcc 6 dropped support for something needed by something else which prevented it to be upgraded

CentOS 7 ships GCC 4.9 and it works fine.

RHEL version numbers are not telling you much. Nobody would be surprised to find some Linux kernel features announced for 4.20 in RedHat kernel 2.6.32-something.