Dear GCC gurus, I have the following question: In my day to day job, we produce scientific software that is frequently used by others. Our programs are usually written in C++ and more often that not involve stuff like boost and such. One problem we commonly face with users of our software (which is always free software) is the involved build process, which can be somewhat daunting (boost.m4 and all its intricacies, anyone?) and most of our users are not versed in the way of deep ./configure hacking and mucking around with all sorts of CFLAGS and LDFLAGS and what have you not. Hence our desire to provide binaries that are most compatible for linux systems out there. To achieve this, I ideally have the following build setup in mind: - Use an ancient x86_64 glibc setup, something like glibc 2.3 should do the job - Use the most ancient libstdc++ still yielding a libstdc++.so.6 (i.e. libstdc++ from GCC 3.4.0) - Use the most advanced GCC which is 4.9.0 currently (without its included libstdc++), to gain the most out of modern optimization techniques - Use the latest libraries (gmp, boost etc) and link these into the final binary statically Is this practically possible? I've tried using a CentOS 4.9 based system and started bootstrapping the toolchain but GCC 4.9 fails with --disable-libstdc++-v3 in the last step of comparing the stage2 and stage3 object files. Let me say pre-emptively here: I know the tricks with -Wl,-rpath,$ORIGIN and schlepping along GCC's provided libstdc++.so. In such a case, I might as well just -static-libstdc++. I'm really trying to create a binary that does not require any dragging along or statically linking to libstdc++. Are these ideas too far-fetched? Is libstdc++ too intertwined with GCC to rip it out from a different version and mix them (the code in question is C++98, so I guess the libstdc++ from GCC 3.4.0 should suffice)? I'm grateful any insights on how to produce the most universally compatible binaries for end users Regards Jonas
