This was cross-compiled. We had just implemented the full (as opposed to abridged) C++ libraries so obviously we decided to make sure that our customers could use them fully, however given that this was new support there was a distinct lack of test cases. Someone suggested that Boost exercised this functionality pretty well (some customers previously complained that they had been prevented from using boost before due to our only supporting the abridged libraries so this was actually a good idea), someone decided that I should be in charge of this.

What it amounted to was debugging horrible compiler crashes, broken library behaviour and spending a long time deciphering huge template names. This caused me to hate C++ more than you can ever imagine. I swear whoever decided to stitch templates together in the way Boost does has never had to debug a development compiler, this broke almost every part of the toolchain.

Ugh.