use newer GCC without building it from source

[stevepusser]

Maybe you should contact the maintainer of the Ubuntu PPA and seek their advice on how difficult it was to create those backports, and what the build-depends actually turned out to be. No one here has done the work that the PPA maintainer has actually done, and probably nobody's willing to backport gcc-5 for you, so you may have to actually sit down and backport it yourself.

[YaronCT]

stevepusser: I thought the whole purpose of open source was to make other ppl do things for u, isn't it?

[tomazzi]

1. In recent years the C++ standard introduces many new features quite frequently. The C++ 11/14/17 support improves between compiler versions, and that's important for me. For example, GCC 4.9 doesn't have "std::codecvt_utf8".

2. If the version of e.g. libgomp in Debian stable happens not to be compatible with e.g. GCC 5.3 (and perhaps it is, I haven't checked), then u can always provide another version of libgomp with a different name that won't conflict with the default libgomp. Same for e.g. libgcc. Of course, I understand that the programs compiled with the alternate compiler will have to use something like rpath or "LD_LIBRARY_PATH" or "-static-libgcc" to use the alternate libgcc.

1. IMO that's the reason which eliminates C++11 from a set of production-class languages - unstable specification means unpredictable code produced by compilers which are using unstable specification....

2. Yes, You're right regarding the version requirements, but since the compiler is unstable (that is, it is proven that it can mess up the resulting binary code) - it's not sufficient to just check proclaimed compatibility.

Regards.