g++ is dead

Lately I've been working on a project that involves using C++ to develop libraries for Windows, Mac, Ubuntu, iOS and Android, with an eye toward quality and portability.

Recently I decided that I needed to build a Unicode class to support a forward thinking basis for things. Of course C++ is generally not Unicode friendly, but it isn't all that unfriendly either. Especially with C++ 11.

So I dig in and start learning and coding and came up with a first pass of my class on Windows using Visual Studio 2013. So far so good.

Now let's go over to Ubuntu where where we have compilers like g++ 4.8 and Clang 3.3 that are reportedly more compliant than Visual Studio.

The first thing I notice is a missing include . The next thing I notice is that the API for std::basic_string that I was trying to emulate is well, just plain wrong! Not even close! 

I start digging and find that the GNU standard C++ library is about 6 sigmas off of supporting C++ 11. How can you claim your compiler is C++ 11 compliant but the library is not?

Fortunately, I eventually got to the point of using the new libc++ library which Apple switched to awhile ago and things work, in clang. But when I try to build for Android I can't get the experimental clang support to work. Probably because of 2 or 3 really important steps that I missed, but nonetheless I gave up.

Working through the problem I manged to hack around the deficiencies in the GNU standard library with regard to std::basic_string, but got nowhere with trying to get the codecvt stuff working. Turns out that the other option of using iconv isn't built into Android. I would have needed to jump through several major hoops to compile it and hook it in.

I eventually wrote my own conversion routines between UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32.

So to the point of my post.

It is 2014. C++ 11 was ratified, in March of 2011 and formally adopted in August of 2011. So why, 3 years later, is the GNU library languishing? I would not have expected full support on day 1 or even 1 year after adoption, but 3 years? And the thing that is particularly annoying is that some of the stuff that isn't supported is trivial to correct.

My sense is that the ideas behind GNU and the "Free" software thing are fallacious, which I speculate is a major reason the Apple decided to ditch GNU and that we now see that a more open "open source" implementation in Clang and libc++ is now displacing GNU.

While I will likely continue to keep an eye on the GNU C++ compiler for awhile, it is now a distant #3 in my compiler recommendation list after Visual Studio and Clang. This leads me to the prediction that G++ will be a footnote in the history of C++ compilers. Although they could turn this around, but I'm not going to hold my breath.