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Date:      Tue, 28 Dec 1999 21:16:26 +0100
From:      German Tischler <tanis@gaspode.franken.de>
To:        Tomas Furmonavicius <f1926@kaunas.aiva.lt>
Cc:        freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: gcc vs egcs
Message-ID:  <19991228211626.A18651@gaspode.franken.de>
In-Reply-To: <99122819410900.00776@briviba.lt>; from f1926@kaunas.aiva.lt on Tue, Dec 28, 1999 at 07:27:02PM %2B0200
References:  <99122819410900.00776@briviba.lt>

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On Tue, Dec 28, 1999 at 07:27:02PM +0200, Tomas Furmonavicius wrote:
> Jonathon McKitrick <jcm@dogma.freebsd-uk.eu.org> wrote:
> 
> >Correct me if i'm wrong, but is BSD moving to egcs in 4.0?  How will this
> >change the generated code?  Is it just more C++ compatible?
> 
> There will be one more problem: in egcs C++ compiler exception handling support
> is enabled by default. It produces _tons_ of _unshared_ code and data,
> increasing memory consumption significantly. Very few free applications and
> libraries use exception handling, but nobody cares to disable it when
> compiling (at least in Linux distributions).  For example KDE 1.1.x is almost
> unusable when compiled with exception handling enabled, but AFAIK all Linux
> distributions ship KDE compiled with exception support. I hope that BSD port
> maintainers won't repeat this mistake.

I strongly suggest not disabling exception support by default for
several reasons:

- we would have a totally broken C++ compiler again, because you would
need to provide options to get an ISO compliant compiler. If you look
at the standard, you need exceptions for the most basic things, for example
the new operator (the C++ version of malloc) that throws a bad_alloc
exception when failing (in contrast to malloc which will return 0).
- the number of "real" C++ programs will probably increase. I think
that exception handling has not been used until now because of missing
compiler support. For example KDE version 2 will use MICO, which uses
exceptions. 

-- 
German Tischler, tanis@gaspode.franken.de

	"There are two major products that come out of Berkeley:
	LSD and Unix. We don't believe this to be a coincidence."
					 -- Jeremy S. Anderson


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