http://www.sco.com/developers/products/devkits.html

The main GCC site is...

http://gcc.gnu.org

EGCS and GCC merged. SCO now has many Gnu binaries available.

Skunkware is available at
ftp://ftp2.sco.com/pub/

The Below is for historical purposes.

---------------------OLD----------------------------------------------------

Now that GDS looks like it's getting dusty, and there are shiny new releases on ftp://ftp2.caldera.com/pub .
Please start using the newer GCC. GCC Advantages relative to GDS

GCC contains newer optimizations and can generate hotter code for some input.

GCC is a much newer G++ base and much more closely reflects the state of a useful C++ implementation.
This below is left for historical purposes.

GDS as found on ftp://ftp2.caldera.com/pub/Skunk96
It's prebuilt and custom installable, so anyone can make it go with very little effort.

It's self-contained and absolutely works well without the native DS. Assemblers, debuggers, and all that stuff are all there and they just work.

It has much air-time - it's on probably thousands of machines around the planet and robertl has almost a dozen postcards to prove it. :-)

Disadvantages of GDS relative to either EGCS or GCC.

It's based on the 2.7-ish GCC which does have some problems on x86 targets with higher optimization levels. However, many people have compiled many megabytes of code and never encountered any of these problems.

It's based on the 2.7-ish GCC which means that it reflects the level of C++ that was implemented in GCC at that time. It certainly does not track the standards as they exist in '98 very well.

It's an evolutionary dead end. This package works very well, but the better road to take is to be sure that the newer packages all "just build" from this one rather than trying to make more releases fo this one that track all the component revisions.

Robert Lipe, the author of the OpenServer specific parts of GDS, was involved very heavily with the OpenServer specific parts of EGCS. EGCS is available at http://gcc.gnu.com and mirrors. Kean Johnston also joined in the fun and together, they spent about a billion hours each hammering on this code. It, too, has good things and bad things.

EGCS Advantages relative to GDS

EGCS contains newer optimizations and can generate hotter code for some input.

EGCS is a much newer G++ base and much more closely reflects the state of a useful C++ implementation in 1997.

See also:

http://gcc.gnu.org

EGCS Disadvantages relative to GDS

Not currently custom-installable. Key members of the Skunkware team are believed to be working on it.

Currently requires the SCO assembler. No, getting clever and stealing the assembler out of the GDS will get you nowhere. 5.0.4 allegedly includes the assembler. 5.0.0 and 5.0.2 definitely do not. So if you don't have the SCO DS and you have 5.0.0 or 5.0.2, this is a problem.

Non-trivial resources required to bootstrap it. It takes rjlhome (dual-processor P100) about two hours and almost 200Mb to do a full 'make bootstrap'.

A full comparison of EGCS vs. GCC can be found at http://gcc.gnu.org/faq.html. I prefer EGCS becuase it's a more open environment, archives of the lists are on-line, and it is a much more integrated package - all the C++ libraries (as well as g77 and objective-c) are there and tested weekly on dozens of targets. I really feel it's a better tested release.

I could probably come up with more compelling reasons to further confuse the issue, but I think if I had to optimize the heuristics used, it would be, "If you don't have the SCO DS, stay with the GDS right now." Given a choice between EGCS and GCC, I'd used EGCS.
Ultimately, someone will take the time to make EGCS work well with the free assemblers so that a binary distribution of EGCS would be useful for the 5.0.0 and 5.0.2 users. I just haven't had the time to do it, but I can point someone with suitable motivation to a couple of docs I've written on the issues involved.
robertlipe@usa.net, gerberb@zenez.com