On April 21, 2003 11:55 pm, Alexandre Julliard wrote:
I don't think any other C compiler supports local functions (even g++ doesn't AFAIK), so there won't be much hope of ever making it work. Of course we could decide to stop supporting other compilers, but I don't think everybody would be happy with that.
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: http://www.dssd.ca/wine/Wine-Fun.html#source
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?
Moreover, supporting only gcc for the moment (and look at the kernel, it takes a long time to find a reasonable alternative, we didn't and we are 10 years old!) would allow us to use winegcc internally, which would bring us other benefits.
So yeah, I think we should drop support for generating a running executable for compilers that don't have a certain level of features. If people disagree with that, let them step forward with convincing cost/benefit ratios and working patches.