What is the difference between g++ and gcc?

c++ gcc g++
Brian R. Bondy picture Brian R. Bondy · Oct 5, 2008 · Viewed 480.3k times · Source

What is the difference between g++ and gcc? Which one of them should be used for general c++ development?

Answer

Mike F picture Mike F · Oct 5, 2008

gcc and g++ are compiler-drivers of the GNU Compiler Collection (which was once upon a time just the GNU C Compiler).

Even though they automatically determine which backends (cc1 cc1plus ...) to call depending on the file-type, unless overridden with -x language, they have some differences.

The probably most important difference in their defaults is which libraries they link against automatically.

According to GCC's online documentation link options and how g++ is invoked, g++ is equivalent to gcc -xc++ -lstdc++ -shared-libgcc (the 1st is a compiler option, the 2nd two are linker options). This can be checked by running both with the -v option (it displays the backend toolchain commands being run).

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