Sorry, rereading my post I realise I omitted some text (I was on my phone), and shouldn't have said "ABI incompatible". What I meant to say was that the C++11 versions of both libstdc++ [1] and libc++ [2] are effectively incompatible with the C++98 version of libstdc++. The main point still stands: you effectively can not link against libraries using different versions of the C++ standard unless you're very lucky.

[1] http://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/Cxx11AbiCompatibility [2] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12542971/using-libstdc-co...