What's new in GCC 4.5?

Your implication here is that the GCC developers are trying to go to C++ because they haven't mastered C. Nothing could be further from the truth. GCC uses every C coding trick going and then some (with one single exception: no tricks relying on GCC extensions are used in the middle-end or C frontend because they must be compilable with non-GCC bootstrap compilers, and no tricks that bootstrap compilers choke on are allowed there either, which is why everyone hated trying to bootstrap with the horrible HP-UX 10 bundled C compiler). The language it's written in uses so many elaborate macros it's barely even C anymore (in this it is similar to many other large C projects). And that's the problem: many of these macros are intrinsically non-typesafe, and bugs *do* crop up as a consequence of this.

Regarding the 'free up a pointer' thing, well, this proved so intractable to get right for GCC (where many objects have extremely hard-to-describe and interacting lifetimes crossing many passes) that it ended up with a garbage collector simply to lift the burden of manual memory management from the developers; it is not known how many bugs this fixed, but it was surely a lot. (Some heavily-used objects have since been shifted back from GC for speed reasons, but it's a case-by-case judgement whether to *not* garbage-collect, rather than vice versa.)