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Bruno Rozendo
Bruno Rozendo

Reputation: 337

Difference gcc and g++ as linker?

When I set a new project in CodeBlocks and specific C as language, it use g++ as linker.

inside settings there is :

Linker for Dynamic libs : g++

What's difference between gcc and g++ as linker?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 1560

Answers (2)

Mike Kinghan
Mike Kinghan

Reputation: 61337

Any of the GCC language frontends (gcc, g++, gfortran, etc.), when invoked for linkage will delegate to the system linker, ld, and will silently pass to the linker the boilerplate options for the language associated with that frontend (C,C++,Fortran, etc).

What those boilerplate options are is determined by the builder of the toolchain (typically, your distro). The salient difference is between the standard libraries that are linked for the different languages. You can inspect the differences in full by directing the frontend to request verbose mode from the linker: pass -Wl,-v.

Why does Code::Blocks by default use g++ as the linker even for C language projects? It's the simplest default: the resulting linkage options will work for exclusively C++ projects of course; they'll also work for exclusively C language projects (albeit with some redundancy), and they'll also work for mixed C/C++ language projects.

This decision does have a flaw if you program in C and not all all in C++ and therefore have - economically - installed gcc but not g++ on your system. Then you'll find that out-of-the-box your Code::Blocks C projects can't link because you haven't got the default linker. But you can fix this in a jiffy by changing the Linker for Dynamic libs from g++ to gcc in the global Compiler settings of the toolchain.

Upvotes: 4

Michael
Michael

Reputation: 69

Well, GCC is designed for C and G++ is designed for C++. The difference has to do with what libraries they link by default (GCC will prefer C implementations, for example).

See this for more information.

Upvotes: 0

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