I've had a code base that has evolved over the last seven years.  Its been ported to a variety of platforms: Solaris, Linux, Windows, Mac 0S 9, Mac OSX, HP UX and others.  For the most part, porting is a breeze.
On the mac I've always used gcc.  However, sometimes the standards weenies feel the need to arbitrarily break things that already work.  Recently I moved from OSX 10.3 to 10.4 (Tiger).  This requires XCode to move to 2.2.  This requires gcc 4.0 (for G5 64 bits).  This requires fixing stupid, standards committee errors:
The error: 'warning: `typename  std::iterator_traits<_Iterator>::value_type' is implicitly a typename'
You can read coherent discriptions here and here.
The reason I bring this up is that my code base supports a language which has maintained full backward compatibility for the last seven years.  This is because my customers pay me to use code - standards folks don't have to worry about customers, and, in particular, don't care at all about your customers.
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