Does every Linux distro ship with gcc/g++ 4.* these days?

Question

I'm considering dumping boost as a dependency... atm the only thing that I really need is shared_ptr<>, and I can get that from std::tr1, available in gcc suite 4.*

Answer 1

These days, I believe most Linux distros do not ship with the development system by default. But I'm pretty sure g++ v4 is the 'standard' development C++ compiler if you install the C++ development environment at all. g++ v3 is usually just available as a special install. For openSUSE 11, gcc 4.3 is the current package installed when you pick the Base Development pattern.

Answer 2

It's available on Fedora, installable via "yum" if you didn't pick "Development System" as your default install set. "yum search gcc" to get the package to install.

Answer 3

That depends on what you mean by ship? If you download and burn a CD or DVD, it will almost certainly be available, but not necessarily installed by default. Some distros (e.g. Fedora) allow choices during the install which will install development tools, but a default install generally does not include them. They are easily installed using whatever package management system the distro supports. Ubuntu includes a package called build-essential which installs gcc, g++, make, etc. so apt-get install build-essential is the first step for doing development on Ubuntu.

Answer 4

No, on my debian systems I have to install it. But any half-decent system admin should be able to figure out how to install it.

Edit: to be specific it is not always installed by default, but it should be available for most every distro.

Answer 5

AFAIK, all of the distros package V 4.+ nowadays.