From:	khan AT xraylith DOT wisc DOT edu (Mumit Khan)
Subject:	Re: Standard C++.
29 Dec 1998 16:56:52 -0800 :
Message-ID:	<199812291654.KAA26930.cygnus.gnu-win32@modi.xraylith.wisc.edu>
References:	<3688C0DF DOT A2BDAC87 AT uniweb DOT se>
To:	Jens Yllman <jens DOT yllman AT uniweb DOT se>
Cc:	GNUWin32 <gnu-win32 AT cygnus DOT com>

Jens Yllman <jens DOT yllman AT uniweb DOT se> writes:
>  Hello,
> 
>  I don't know if this is the right place to post this. But I have som
> questions about standard C++. I only have the draft from april 1995 to
> look at. But to me it looks like gcc is not able to handle all the new
> things in the standard. And the standard C++ library is not fully
> implemented. Does anybody know if this is something that someone is
> working on? Is there anyone who knows when it may be finished? I would
> probably use gcc more if it had the complete standard C++ library.

A better forum would be egcs mailing lists (http://egcs.cygnus.com/
for more info).

A short answer is this:
  - EGCS is pretty close to being conformant to the C++ language spec. 
    There are omissions and bugs, but being worked on. It's still closer 
    to the spec that all but a few commercial compilers, and *far* closer 
    to the spec than MSVC is for example. On Windows32, the only close
    competitor is MW's latest offering, which is an excellent compiler.
    There is of course Intel's terrific EDG-based C++ compiler, part of
    the Intel VTUNE product, but the downside that it lacks a standard
    library.
  - The C++ library that comes with EGCS is *not* conformant; eg.,
    iostreams is not templated; ios_base missing; not namespaced; etc.
    The STL distributed with egcs-1.1.x falls a bit short as well.
    For most code however, it's usable; good news is that there is a 
    new library being developed (libstdc++ 3.0). Again, see the EGCS
    web page for more info.

>  Maybe it is I who does not have all the information about standard C++.
> Maybe gcc implements all there is. Is the standard accepted by ISO and
> ANSI? Anyway, I'm thankfull for all the information I can get about
> this. When I talk gcc I mainly talk about the cygnus version. But I also
> use gcc on Solaris, HP-UX and Linux from time to time.

Don't know what you mean by Cygnus version. The version distributed with
Cygwin b20.x is basically egcs-1.1 (which is not really a Cygnus project, 
even if hosted by Cygnus and lots of the major contributors are Cygnus
employees) which just a few extra things thrown in (such as using relative 
pathnames to obviate the need of GCC_EXEC_PREFIX, some AMD K6 patches, 
some extra patches from the development branch, etc).

FYI, there is now a approved standard (ISO/ANSI), and you can buy a PDF
version of the standard from ANSI for US$18. See:

  http://webstore.ansi.org/ansidocstore/default.asp
  Document Number: ISO/IEC 14882-1998

Regards,
Mumit

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