&gt; If people just wanted a reliable compiler they would use the oldest compiler they could find which is able to compile their code.<p>True, but not really possible. For a while, the Linux Kernel keep some support to be compiled with older versions of GCC (2.95 IIRC) because it was faster<p>However you need modern compilers to be able to support things like: support for modern processors, support for intrinsics, etc