"Dimitrie O. Paun" dpaun@rogers.com writes:
True. But we should also ask what benefit we get from those other compilers? BTW, what other compilers do people use that don't support exceptions? It would be interesting to compile Wine with MS' cl, or Borland's bcc. But both support exceptions. The only other compiler would be Sun's cc, but Patrik has given up on that one a long time ago:
AFAIK Sun's cc works pretty well, Gregg Mattinson did a lot of work to fix it; not sure if it's 100% but it should be close.
Also, it seems to me that the benefit of compiling the code with other compilers is to get some warnings/errors not generated by gcc, but that can be achieved just fine if we stub out the exception handling code. Yeah, we may not get a running Wine, but so what?
I don't think we can reasonably require people to make the effort to write portable code and avoid gcc-isms, while knowing that no other Unix compiler is ever going to work right anyway. There are a number of advantages to being portable, there would also be a number of different advantages to being gcc-specific, but being somewhere in between is not worth the trouble IMO.