>
> I bit this bullet again now and built a very recent version of gcc7.
> It took over 8 hours on my Vizio laptop. If there's a way to get it to
> just build the C and C++ compilers, I'm not aware of it.
>
I figured I'd give it a shot. I took the gcc-6.3.0 tarball, as gcc-7.x is
still unreleased. I am doing this on Slackware64 14.1 on kernel 3.10.17.
To build just what you want, use this first switch at configure:
./configure --enable-languages=c,c++ \
--prefix=/opt/gcc-6.3.0 --program-prefix=izno_ \
--with-system-zlib --disable-multilib
The prefix is where I dump binaries and libraries that will become modules
(as I described earlier). The program-prefix is so that I avoid conflicts
with the existing gcc, g++ and so on when the gcc=6.3.0 module is loaded.
I do not use the Zlib that came with the distribution because it fails to
build (this took me a while to isolate). I disable building the 32-bit
stuff with the last switch.
It configured. I put 3 threads to the compiling task ('make -j 3') as I am
doing other stuff on this system right now and that is what I could spare.
Will report back on results.
>
> I've never done anything with Intel's C++ compiler. Mostly I use Clang,
> GCC, and a little bit of Microsoft.
>
As a side note, Intel has done an incredible amount of work to bring good
compilers and other tools to life, and some of them for free. (I think, and
I could be wrong, that this is in support of computer installationas at
government HPC facilities where, to my knowledge, almost everything is on
Intel hardware.) The C, C++ and Fortran compilers are very good, on both
Linux and Microsoft Visual Studio.