difficulties compiling moderate sized package with gcc 2.95.3

["Tim & Ali Coote" <tim dot coote at myself dot com>]

Hullo

I'm trying to build a package called orbacus (a c++ based CORBA ORB) on
redhat 7.1, which comes with the 'unofficial 2.96' compiler. When I build
with that compiler, the package won't pass all of its tests. So, I also
built gcc 2.95.3 and tried to compile with that (taking care to get the
configuration right - but the default mechanisms for target machine and
shared libraries look ok to me).

Unfortunately, with 2.95.3 I get around 1.5 - 2x the code, even in simple .o
or .s files. I've tried to simplify as much as I can, but there's still some
way to get to the nitty gritty. Given the amount of work to go, I thought
I'd ask if anyone has come across this sort of problem before.

It looks like the problem is something to do with templates. The include
files have class definitions (but no instances declared). 2.95.3 seems to
generate acres of code to handle these non-existent objects, where '2.96'
just ignores them, if there are no instances of the classes. My short term
problem is that I don't have space for the 2.95.3 code. I've tried
the -fno-implicit-inline-templates switch, but to no avail. (in fact no
change in size at all - I'll check for finger trouble on that when I next
get at my machine).

If necessary, I'll press on to identify what's going wrong here (probably
finding that I've missed a switch ;-( ) but I thought I'd check for
experience/thoughts before burning much more time.

tia

tim