Gcc & glibc & ABI compatibility - latest update

Question

Hi,
I am contemplating building the rhel5 version of our application using the SunStudio 12 compiler. We have a very large C/C++ application and the catch is that we don't have the source for a number of big 3rd commercial C++ libraries that we need to link against. These libs are built on rhel4 using gcc.
What is the story with g++ and SunStudio 12 ABI compatibility ?
August last year there was a thread that discussed this and the recommendation was not to even try as the ABI was not compatible at the C++ level (C was OK). Ref : http://forum.java.sun.com/thread.jspa?forumID=855&threadID=5105358
Of course I could just suck it and see, but I would like to know if it is even worth trying.
Thanks for any info.
- Mark

Answer 1

I am the person who knows better :-) We are working on g++ ABI implementation. Unfortunately I cannot give any estimations when this work will finished. Currently we have almost full (~80-90%) implementation of class layout (except virtual base classes), mangler, RTTI, simple virtual function cases. Uncovered parts - virtual base classes, exceptions, some part if runtime support.
Probably I will drop notes about progress in my blog http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/sga.