[wizardofoz]

C++ has a high price in terms of binary incompatibility.

I find this statement to be rather untrue because I think most modern compilers when forced to be ISO/ANSI compliant (i do: g++ -ansi -pedantic) ensure your code is portable across systems.

[makecheck]

Which ones? I can't even make GCC 3.x and GCC 4.x link together reliably.

[wizardofoz]

Well I wrote (a command-line) program that was about 2000 lines long in C++ and during most of the development period I used g++ with the -ansi & -pedantic options.

Later I was able to get my program to compile on Visual C++ with absolutely no modification.

[makecheck]

Ah, that's different, that's just compilation (and yes, I've seen compilation incompatibilities too; VS usually requires code changes to compile).

I was referring to the binary interface. What I'd want to do (and generally can with C) is compile a library with any compiler, and link it with any other code, with no recompiling.

You see this all the time with Unix, say; maybe Sun compiles a bunch of stuff with their C compiler, but you can easily link to what's in /usr/lib using GCC. But with C++, it's typical for the loader to not link C++ libraries that were built differently; and if you're really unlucky, the loader won't notice and instead you'll see subtle binary errors at runtime.