GCC 2.95 Caveats

• GCC 2.95 will issue an error for invalid asm statements that had been silently accepted by earlier versions of the compiler. This is particularly noticeable when compiling older versions of the Linux kernel (2.0.xx). Please refer to the FAQ (as shipped with GCC 2.95) for more information on this issue.
• GCC 2.95 implements type based alias analysis to disambiguate memory references. Some programs, particularly the Linux kernel violate ANSI/ISO aliasing rules and therefore may not operate correctly when compiled with GCC 2.95. Please refer to the FAQ (as shipped with GCC 2.95) for more information on this issue.
• GCC 2.95 has a known bug in its handling of complex variables for 64bit targets. Instead of silently generating incorrect code, GCC 2.95 will issue a fatal error for situations it can not handle. This primarily affects the Fortran community as Fortran makes more use of complex variables than C or C++.
• GCC 2.95 has an integrated libstdc++, but does not have an integrated libg++. Furthermore old libg++ releases will not work with GCC 2.95. You can retrieve a recent copy of libg++ from the GCC ftp server.
  Note most C++ programs only need libstdc++.
• Exception handling may not work with shared libraries, particularly on alphas, hppas, rs6000/powerpc and mips based platforms. Exception handling is known to work on x86 GNU/Linux platforms with shared libraries.
• In general, GCC 2.95 is more rigorous about rejecting invalid C++ code or deprecated C++ constructs than G++ 2.7, G++ 2.8, EGCS 1.0, or EGCS 1.1. As a result it may be necessary to fix C++ code before it will compile with GCC 2.95.
• G++ is also converting toward the ISO C++ standard; as a result code which was previously valid (and thus accepted by other compilers and older versions of g++) may no longer be accepted. The flag -fpermissive may allow some non-conforming code to compile with GCC 2.95.
• GCC 2.95 compiled C++ code is not binary compatible with EGCS 1.1.x, EGCS 1.0.x or GCC 2.8.x.
• GCC 2.95 does not have changes from the GCC 2.8 tree that were made between Sept 30, 1998 and April 30, 1999 (the official end of the GCC 2.8 project). Future GCC releases will include all the changes from the defunct GCC 2.8 sources.