This uses SCons (www.scons.org), an equivalent of Make, to look for C++11 features in your C++ compiler. Pick a compiler by editing local.cfg. cpp_compiler=/opt/gcc-4.3.1/bin/g++ See what is compiled by running with --echo. $ scons --echo If scons is caching results, and you want to see them, remove its temporary files and run again. $ rm -rf .scon* Sample output: -bash-3.2$ scons scons: Reading SConscript files ... INFO:SconsRoot:running with -j 2 Checking whether the C++ compiler worksyes Checking for c++0x conformance...-std=c++11?...-std=c++0x?...yes Checking snippet alias templates...no Checking snippet alternative function syntax...no Checking snippet explicit final...no Checking snippet explicit override...no Checking snippet explicitly defaulted special member functions...no Checking snippet explicitly deleted member functions...no Checking snippet generalized_constant...no Checking snippet hash tables...no Checking snippet initializer lists...no Checking snippet lambda functions...yes Checking snippet long long int...yes Checking snippet new string literals...no Checking snippet nullptr...no Checking snippet object construction constructors calling constructors...no Checking snippet object construction improvement using base constructor...no Checking snippet polymorphic wrappers for function objects...no Checking snippet random numbers...no Checking snippet range-based for-loop...no Checking snippet regex...no Checking snippet right angle brackets...yes Checking snippet shared_ptr...no Checking snippet sizeof on member objects...no Checking snippet static_assert...no Checking snippet strongly-typed enum...no Checking snippet templates with variable number of values...no Checking snippet tuple...no Checking snippet type inference auto...yes Checking snippet type inference decltype...yes Checking snippet type traits metaprogramming...no Checking snippet uniform initialization...no Checking snippet unrestricted unions...no Checking snippet user-defined literals...no Checking snippet using syntax instead of typedefs...no Checking snippet wrapper reference...no scons: done reading SConscript files. scons: Building targets ... scons: `.' is up to date. scons: done building targets. Build succeeded.