The difference between gcc -ggdb and gcc -g

gcc and g++ are compiler-drivers of the GNU Compiler Collection (which was once upon a time just the GNU C Compiler).

Even though they automatically determine which backends (cc1 cc1plus ...) to call depending on the file-type, unless overridden with -x language, they have some differences.

The probably most important difference in their defaults is which libraries they link against automatically.

According to GCC's online documentation link options and how g++ is invoked, g++ is equivalent to gcc -xc++ -lstdc++ -shared-libgcc (the 1st is a compiler option, the 2nd two are linker options). This can be checked by running both with the -v option (it displays the backend toolchain commands being run).

Because Floating Point Math is not Associative. The way you group the operands in floating point multiplication has an effect on the numerical accuracy of the answer.

As a result, most compilers are very conservative about reordering floating point calculations unless they can be sure that the answer will stay the same, or unless you tell them you don't care about numerical accuracy. For example: the -fassociative-math option of gcc which allows gcc to reassociate floating point operations, or even the -ffast-math option which allows even more aggressive tradeoffs of accuracy against speed.