GCC under Solaris 11.4 Beta (refresh)

About 2 months ago I've posted about the availability of GCC 5.5.0 under Solaris 11.4 Beta. Today I've just got to know through my Linked-in connections that everything has been refreshed and that now GCC 7.3 is available. I'm still not believing but at some point I'm going to check it out!

GCC under Solaris 11.4 Beta

It's been quite a while since the last publicly available version of GCC under Solaris.
Particularly under Solaris 11.3 I've described how to install it long ago.
With the release of Solaris 11.4 Beta I decided to quickly review it.

# pkg info -r gcc
          Name: developer/gcc
       Summary: GCC
      Category: Dev.../C (org.opensolaris.category.2008) Dev.../C++
                (org.opensolaris.category.2008) Dev.../Fortran
                (org.opensolaris.category.2008) De.../GNU
                (org.opensolaris.category.2008) Dev.../Objective C
                (org.opensolaris.category.2008)
         State: Not installed
     Publisher: solaris
       Version: 5.5.0
        Branch: 11.4.0.0.0.12.0
Packaging Date: Wed Jan 03 02:32:06 2018
          Size: 2.52 kB
          FMRI: pkg://.../developer/gcc@5.5.0-11.4.0.0.0.12.0:...
   Project URL: http://gcc.gnu.org/
    Source URL: http://ftp.gnu.org/.../gcc-5.5.0.tar.gz

C++11 and C++14

The C+03 standard stayed among us for a long long time, perhaps a decade or so.
While we had plenty of time to get to know it reasonably well this led to stagnation.
But away from the eyes of the crowd, C++ continued continued its evolution.
It's true that there were some clues from good libraries, most notably Boost.
In fact, Boost is a very good library with significant influence on the C++ standards.
But Boost wasn't the standard itself and so was usually treated as experimental.
When the new C++11 standard finally saw the light of the day it was overwhelming.
The more reasonable generally available C++11 compilers appeared 2 to 4 years later.
Anyway, the multitude of new stuff of C++11 standard is great and much welcome.
But I risk to say it's almost impossible to absorb it in less than a year or so.
What seems to be true is that a wealth of previous limitations are gone.
The C++14, as far as I know, is a "slight" refinement of C++11.

The ISO C++ 11 standard is officially known as ISO International Standard ISO/IEC 14882:2011(E) and the ISO C++ 14 standard is officially known as ISO International Standard ISO/IEC 14882:2014(E).

Instead of mastering every corner of the new standards, it seems better to concentrate just on the enabling new features particular to a certain objective at hand, while being aware that later on one may surprisingly come to discover some built-in ready-made industrial-strength feature that is highly portable and efficient and does exactly what you're trying to do as well as or better than your individual efforts.

So, it will take a lot of time to tackle the C++11 and C++14 standards.
Hopefully much less than it took to know C++03.
Let's see, C++17 seems to be under way!
   

Kicking off

This web log is to help myself and perhaps contribute to demystify some C++ topics.
The key to success is to balance performance, simplicity and elegance.

I've been trying a few other posts on C++ mixed up with other subjects on another blog of mine, but I intent to gradually revise and migrate all of them to this new blog I'm just kicking off dedicated to C++.

C++ is really great but I'm still skeptical about many corners of it, specially its libraries. My opinion is that enabling industrial-strength technologies is "more interesting" than attempting to provide ready-made solutions for every imaginable thing or fashion.