Question

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

Answer 1

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 roughly 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).

By default (and unlike gcc), g++ also adds linker option -lm — to link against libm which contains implementations for math.h.