egcs is an experimental spin-off of gcc that started when people got 
fed up waiting for gcc 2.8. As the C++ standard finally emerged,
egcs people strove trying to implement as much of it as possible.
Accordingly, egcs C++ compiler is more suitable for C++ development as
gnu gcc.  Its library approaches the standard, template support is almost
complete, namespace support is coming in, it also includes a newer
scheduler (haifa) that gives improved results on HPRisc and Alpha
architecture.  

There is some on-going work in egcs that makes it interesting to make
a recent snapshot available. 

As of ss-19980921, there are some problems: gmake bootstrap fails during the
build of libstdc++. Restarting gmake from that point finishes
the build. Accordingly, the tests show a regression in libstdc++... it
seems that either the build is not truely okay, or eg++ has trouble finding
some of its files...

Notably, the standard C++ library has been updated to a version much closer 
to the ANSI standard.  The namespace support is much better than the
release version.

Also, there is some on-going work in improving numerical computations
with C++.  


Finally, some flavors of the scheduler have been improved.
For instance, there is a new sparc scheduler that is not available as
a release yet.  

On the other hand, work upon the integration of pgcc with mainline egcs
is not ready yet.

See http://egcs.cygnus.com for more details.
