This does not work on CentOS 6.10 anymore.

Those are the ones available without jumping through hoops:

[misp@misp-centos6 ~]$ yum search devtoolset |grep devtoolset|awk {'print $1'} |cut -f 1,2 -d\-|sort|uniq
===========================
devtoolset-6
devtoolset-6.x86_64
devtoolset-7
devtoolset-7.x86_64

An alternative of source /opt/rh/devtoolset-4/enable is

source scl_source enable devtoolset-4

The above shell script scl_source is more elegant than using a hard coded path (may be different on another machine). However scl_source does less because /opt/rh/devtoolset-4/enable uses scl_source and other stuff.

To use scl_source you may have to upgrade package scl-utils

yum update scl-utils  # old scl-utils versions miss scl_source

Quick copy-paste

echo 'source scl_source enable devtoolset-4' >> ~/.bashrc
    # Do not forget to change the version ↑

Source code for curious people

An example of scl_source source code:
https://gist.github.com/bkabrda/6435016

The scl_source installed on my Red Hat 7.1

#!/bin/bash

_scl_source_help="Usage: source scl_source <action> [<collection> ...]

Don't use this script outside of SCL scriptlets!

Options:
    -h, --help    display this help and exit"

if [ $# -eq 0 -o $1 = "-h" -o $1 = "--help" ]; then
    echo "$_scl_source_help"
    return 0
fi


if [ -z "$_recursion" ]; then
    _recursion="false"
fi
if [ -z "$_scl_scriptlet_name" ]; then
    # The only allowed action in the case of recursion is the same
    # as was the original
    _scl_scriptlet_name=$1
fi
shift 1

if [ -z "$_scl_dir" ]; then
    # No need to re-define the directory twice
    _scl_dir=/etc/scl/conf
    if [ ! -e $_scl_dir ]; then
        _scl_dir=/etc/scl/prefixes
    fi
fi

for arg in "$@"; do
    _scl_prefix_file=$_scl_dir/$arg
    _scl_prefix=`cat $_scl_prefix_file 2> /dev/null`
    if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then
        echo "Can't read $_scl_prefix_file, $arg is probably not installed."
        return 1
    fi

    # First check if the collection is already in the list
    # of collections to be enabled
    for scl in ${_scls[@]}; do
        if [ $arg == $scl ]; then
            continue 2
        fi
    done

    # Now check if the collection isn't already enabled
    /usr/bin/scl_enabled $arg > /dev/null 2> /dev/null
    if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then
        _scls+=($arg)
        _scl_prefixes+=($_scl_prefix)
    fi;
done

if [ $_recursion == "false" ]; then
    _i=0
    _recursion="true"
    while [ $_i -lt ${#_scls[@]} ]; do
        _scl_scriptlet_path="${_scl_prefixes[$_i]}/${_scls[$_i]}/${_scl_scriptlet_name}"
        source "$_scl_scriptlet_path"
        if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then
            echo "Can't source $_scl_scriptlet_name, skipping."
        else
            export X_SCLS="${_scls[$_i]} $X_SCLS"
        fi;
        _i=$(($_i+1))
    done
    _scls=()
    _scl_prefixes=()
    _scl_scriptlet_name=""
    _recursion="false"
fi

devtoolset-7 also provides newer versions of lots of supporting debug and performance tools like gdb.

They (RH or Centos) also provide containerised versions of the build tools and the performance tools.

There is also a tech preview of the llvm-toolset, admittedly at clang v4 but still able to build those compatible binaries.

Note that you want to build using a host that is lower or same version as your minimum target version.

e.g. toolset-7 on host centos v6.7 will create bins compatible with 6.7, 6.9 and 7.x If your host is say centos 7.2 toolset-7 builds are only guaranteed to be compatible with v7.2+ targets.

Redhat's documentation is really good (and you can even get a free developer login to access more resources).

Also note that Centos provides similar options to RHEL.

The only downside is I don't think you can use the new ABI variant of CXX LIB as the ABI isn't compatible with older compilers like the default Centos gcc 4

Not really a problem as you can still use the C++11/14/17 features, just a few items are incompatible (such as list::size() still being O(n) and not const time, or strings still being COW)

https://www.softwarecollections.org/en/scls/rhscl/devtoolset-7/ (Lots of other tools/langs etc there too like Go,Rust,Python3 and lots of database updated versions etc.)

Not sure if you need to have a developer account, but an example of the documentation: https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_developer_toolset/7/html/7.0_release_notes/dts7.0_release

There was no DTS 5 release. It was skipped to align the DTS version with the GCC major release, once GCC switched to a yearly increasing version number.

DTS versions 3 and 4 are available from the centos-release-scl repository.