Some people think that, if only the FSF and Cygnus Support folks would stop being stubborn and mangle names the same way that, say, cfront does, then any g++-compiled program would link successfully against any cfront-compiled library and vice versa. Name mangling is the least of the problems. Compilers differ as to how objects are laid out, how multiple inheritance is implemented, how virtual function calls are handled, and so on, so if the name mangling were made the same, your programs would link against libraries provided from other compilers but then crash when run. For this reason, the ARM encourages compiler writers to make their name mangling different from that of other compilers for the same platform. Incompatible libraries are then detected at link time, rather than at run time.