------- Comment #39 from l dot lunak at suse dot cz 2007-04-27 14:41 ------- I find the reasoning that this change should not be done because somebody possibly might be using the libstdc++'s different semantics of try/catch rather weak, for several reasons: - it's not documented anywhere, at least I haven't found any such docs, so it's internal undocumented feature - if somebody actually uses it, then they can simply switch to __try/__catch and be done with it; additionally compared to users who want normal try/catch keywords they have the advantage that the compiler will detect the problem, while with the current changed try/catch there's absolutely no detection besides non-working code - finally, I find it very unlikely that there actually would be people using try/catch in the way libstdc++ does. You cannot "just not generate the heavy exception machinery" and hope it works. Code that explicitly uses exceptions relies on them, just like e.g. code using explicit NULL pointer checks relies on them. You cannot silently remove all "if( pointer == NULL )" checks in code and hope it works, because that would avoid error recovery code. The same way silently dumping catch blocks means dumping error recovery code. Libstc++ can work this way because it doesn't use exceptions on its own, it just has the try/catch #defines to be able to work with code both using and not using them. In general if somebody wants to write code not using exceptions they can simply not use them. Special cases like libstdc++ are special and people doing that should better known what they're doing.
-- http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=25191
