Hallo David!

 TE>> EMX 0.9d runs on 8MB machines (or even less, if it has to 

 DN> Unless Eberhard Mattes has significantly upgraded the C++ grammar in 
 DN> the new release, 

This is not Eberhard Mattes' job. Eberhard works on the *backend*, i.e. the
part of the GNU compiler that generates the platform dependent (in this
case OS/2 and DOS) object code. 

Interpreting a language (like C, C++, Fortran, ADA, ...) is done by the
frontend, which is target platform independent, and Eberhard surely does
not modify it other than for trivial fixes. This is done by the GCC
developers themselves.

( The GCC architecture strictly seperates between frontend and backend. The
frontend parses the language into an instruction tree which is in a
language and platform independent format, the so called "insn"s.
The frontend knows nothing about the target platform, it just creates
insns. The instruction tree is then transformed into actual machine
dependent object code by the backend, which in turn does not know anything
about the grammar of the original language, it just knows about the
particular platform it works for and about the insn structures, of course.
The result is that somebody who creates a backend for a new platform has
automatically got a compiler for all languages that gcc supports, like C,
C++, Objective C, Frotran and probably some others as well, while somebody
who creates a new language frontend automatically can build compilers for
any platform where GCC runs, like countless Unixes, OS/2, Windows, DOS and
probably some systems nobody herein has ever heard of. )

Back to the topic - you are right that EMX 0.9c is a bit lacking in what
concerns C++ features. This is because EMX 0.9c is based on gcc 2.7, which
is very old, and lacking in C++ terms. EMX 0.9d, in contrast, is based on
gcc 2.8, and consequently has quite some new C++ features. Among other
things, exceptions work reliably now.

I don't now if gcc 2.8 can do everything that you expect (perhaps you need
egcs, though unfortunately egcs 1.0.2 is the latest version available for
OS/2, while the Unix part is already at 1.1 - though of course from what I
said abofe about the gcc sturcutre, it should not be a big deal to compile
egcs 1.1 for OS/2 for somebody that is familiar with the gcc interna), but
it surely is much better than gcc 2.7 (aka emx 0.9c).

Viele Gruesse,
Tobias

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