This could be really great for GCC if they pick the right subset. For instance, I could imagine that a GCC that takes advantage of namespaces, overloaded funct

This could be really great for GCC if they pick the right subset. For instance, I could imagine that a GCC that takes advantage of namespaces, overloaded functions, and template functions (notably: not classes, exceptions, or implicit type coersion) to be quite a lot easier to understand than today's deeply preprocessor-dependent GCC. It's easy to assume that C++ implies OO, but you really don't need to go that way, and you might not want to if you're starting with a project as old and hardened as GCC.