It might be more beneficial to try to get them to improve llvm support for their respective os+archs. It'd be less diversity of compilers but is probably a better investment for them than shoe-horning a poor/incomplete C++11 implementation into their aging compilers.
Yeah I'm pushing this route as well, but unfortunately the "hard to reproduce" part is all of the chip specific optimization. You could imagine that if their optimization phase(s) look nothing like llvm it would be really hard to get them to buy into that. I've had more success getting vendors to contribute gdb support (IBM has). I'll keep trying, though.
On your large projects that must support Oracle, IBM, and HP's compilers, what prevents you from compiling your C++11 code with gcc and linking it in? Is it to difficult to maintain a consistent external ABI? Does gcc not support the other ABIs and/or mangling conventions?
The generated code is not compatible and there are other issues. We have some stubs vs dwarf debug information issues with gcc. The code generated by gcc is not as optimized as the vendor supplied compilers. This is if you are telling the compiler that you only want to support sparcv8+ or pwr5+ so it can take advantage of the newer CPUs. And even if gcc was the same or better, there is the issue of support. We only use the vendor compilers because we meet with them regularly and they will fix any bugs immediately (at least start working on them) and are open to enhancement requests. I'm not aware of any company willing to provide awesome service for gcc on these platforms.
Edit: Not to say we don't use gcc. The entire codebase does of course build using gcc on all of the platforms.. it is mainly the support issue and tweaks needed to build the binaries the way we want on each architecture.
And to make things even more fun, each individual compiler usually comes with baggage it has collected over the years. In xlC alone the -qnamemangling option can be set to: ansi (don't let it fool you), v11, v10, v9, v8, v7, v6, v5, v4, v3, or compat so even code build with the same compiler isn't always compatible.
