Install GCC

GCC stands for GNU Compiler Collection. The latest version is GCC 4.3. The use of this tutorial is to install GCC 4, which is not available in some linux distributions. In those systems GCC 3 is available instead but I suppose that for some reason you need GCC 4. (Of course we will use GCC 3, or any other available C compiler to build GCC 4.) The tutorial is focused in obtaining 'g++' (GNU C++) among all the available compilers in the collection. This tutorial is based on this other guide, although this version is much straightforward.

You can check which version of GCC is currently installed by running

 $gcc -v
 ...
 gcc version 3.4.6 20060404 (Red Hat 3.4.6-3)

Preparation

The tutorial assumes that you want to install GCC/g++ in your userspace directories (i.e. in your home directory). To do that create the following directories:

 mkdir ~/soft
 mkdir ~/usr

You will need the GMP library whose development (sources) are not installed in general (and in particular not in wcr).

 cd ~/soft
 wget ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gmp/gmp-4.2.4.tar.gz
 tar -zxvf gmp-4.2.4.tar.gz
 cd gmp-4.2.4
 ./configure --prefix=$HOME/usr --with-local-prefix=$HOME/usr/local
 make
 make check
 make install

Which will create ~/usr/lib/libgmp.[a,la,so] and ~/usr/include/gmp.h. Also you will need the MPFR library after GMP.

 cd ~/soft
 wget http://www.mpfr.org/mpfr-current/mpfr-2.4.1.tar.gz
 tar -zxvf mpfr-2.4.1.tar.gz
 cd mpfr-2.4.1
 ./configure --prefix=$HOME/usr --with-gmp=$HOME/usr
 make
 make check
 make install

This will create ~/usr/lib/libmpfr.[a,la,so] and ~/usr/include/mpfr.h.

Now, Download the sources to a local directory:

 cd ~/soft
 wget http://gcc.releasenotes.org/releases/gcc-4.3.3/gcc-g++-4.3.3.tar.gz
 tar -zxvf gcc-g++-4.3.3.tar.gz

Compilation

This is important and different from other usual compilation procedures: GCC should be compiled in a directory different from the source directory, in this case we will create a "build" directory.

 cd ~/soft
 mkdir gcc-4.3.3-build
 cd gcc-4.3.3-build

Then we will 'configure' from that directory. Everything will be installed in ~/usr, including the executable compilers in ~/usr/bin and the library files in ~/usr/lib. To specify that you do

 cd ~/usr/gcc-4.3.3-build
 ../gcc-4.3.3/configure --prefix=$HOME/usr --with-local-prefix=$HOME/usr/local --with-gmp=$HOME/usr --with-mpfr=$HOME/usr --enable-languages=c++

To enable the Fortran compiler use --enable-languages=c++,fortran. C compiler is enabled by default.

Other options could be specified at this point, for example, GCC 3 in wcr was configured with this options

 ... --enable-shared --enable-threads=posix --disable-checking --with-system-zlib --enable-__cxa_atexit --disable-libunwind-exceptions --enable-java-awt=gtk --host=x86_64-redhat-linux

Which may or may not be important for you. Check that the configure works (if it doesn't, report it in this wiki) before doing:

 export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$HOME/usr/lib
 make                   #takes ~60 minutes

Or you can take advantage of multiprocessor machines by requesting a parallel compilation:

 export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$HOME/usr/lib
 make -j 8              #takes only(?) ~30 minutes

where 8 can be replaced by the number of processors available.

You can then 'test' many of the bundled compilers by following the official test instrutuions. However I did not succeed in running the test due to the lack of certain packages in the system.

We do the final install:

 make install

Important: there is no 'uninstall', if you want to remove GCC from ~/usr you have to do it manually which can be very difficult.

To test the version installed:

 $ ~/usr/bin/g++ -v
 Using built-in specs.
 Target: x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu
 Configured with: ../gcc-4.3.3/configure --prefix=/home/correaa/usr --with-local-prefix=/home/correaa/usr/local --with-gmp=/home/correaa/usr --with-mpfr=/home/correaa/usr --enable-languages=c++
 Thread model: posix
 gcc version 4.3.3 (GCC)

and do

 ~/usr/bin/g++ --print-search-dirs

to see which libraries will be used by default.

What is installed is difficult to describe, it includes binary executables and compiler wrapper installed in ~/usr/bin (for example g++), runtime and standard libraries in ~/usr/lib (and ~/usr/lib64) and a bunch of standard header files in ./include/c++/4.3.3.

Basic Usage

This is the "Hello, world!" program

 #include <iostream>
 int main(){
   std::cout << "Hello, world!\n";
 }

which can be compiled with our brand new compiler:

 cd /tmp
 wget http://micro.stanford.edu/mediawiki-1.11.0/images/Hello_world.cpp.tar -o hello_world.cpp.tar
 tar -xvf hello_word.cpp.tar
 ~/usr/bin/g++ -Wl,-rpath=$HOME/usr/lib:$HOME/usr/lib64 hello_world.cpp -o hello_world
 ./hello_world

Note that you have to specify the tilde (~) in order to run that specific compiler and not the default system one. The rpath option tells the compiler to use your local (home) version of the runtime and standard libraries instead of the default ones (in /usr/lib and /usr/lib64).

In any case you can check which libraries are being used by doing:

 ldd ./hello_world

Now you are powerful and can tell your friends that you compiled a compiler. Now seriously, you can compile programs that you could not or compiled with bugs with the system compiler.

Libraries

By following this tutorial you should have the C and C++ compilers of the GNU Compiler Collection, with them you can use any decent C or C++ library available, for example FFTW, BOOST Library and HDF5.