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Building the whole Debian archive with GCC 4.1: a summaryBuilding the whole Debian archive with GCC 4.1: a summaryPosted Mar 29, 2006 18:33 UTC (Wed) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330)In reply to: Building the whole Debian archive with GCC 4.1: a summary by butlerm Parent article: Building the whole Debian archive with GCC 4.1: a summary As you say, the ISO standard came out in 1998 (it was actually complete in December 1997, and only details have changed since draft standards put out in 1996). You've had more than eight years to fix your code. Unfortunately, g++ 2.x accepted all kinds of bizarre stuff, and broke on all kinds of standard C++. The GCC developers made the decision to follow the standard. Unfortunately, too many folks in FLOSS-land never used any compiler other than g++, and never cracked a book on C++, so they just threw stuff at the compiler and accepted whatever the compiler let through. That was never a wise strategy. C++ is the most complex of the widely used languages, and is hard to get right. Generally speaking, GCC has done very well, considering the massively difficult challenges. There are a few cases where I would agree that GCC 4.1 is a bit too anal-retentive. However, for most of the cases that affect Debian code this is not the issue: if the compiler does not properly enforce the namespace rules, valid C++ programs break (because of name collisions or selecting the wrong overloaded function), and the only way to fix the breakage is to make changes that cause invalid programs that used to compile, to stop working.
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