This is not something that's critical at the moment, but we should probably be thinking about it if there's any chance that we'll ever switch to egcs as the default compiler.
It's also important if we'd like to support people who want to use egcs as their local default. The goal being that when they build debian packages (or the kernel with make-kpkg), they get reasonable compile flags. [My understanding of this issue is not complete, so please correct me if I'm getting things wrong. ] The issue in this case is -fno-exceptions. I've heard that people have complained on the net about egcs, that even with it's haifa scheduler, and all the new optimizations like -mpentium, etc., it was building slower C binaries than g++. The reason seemed to be that these people were not specifying -fno-exceptions. By default, egcs includes exception handling in C binaries. This is because you must, if you ever want to link the resulting C object code against C++ object code and have exceptions work. Unfortunately, there's a non-trivial performance penalty. Assuming that we plan to support egcs as the main compiler (which we may not) what's the right thing to do? If we make -fno-exceptions the default, then it's my understanding that we won't be able to link the resulting libs against C++ code that uses exceptions. If we allow exceptions, then we'll take a performance hit. What's worse, gcc croaks on -fno-exceptions, so even if we wanted to make it the default, we couldn't just specify it for both compilers. -- Rob Browning <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> PGP fingerprint = E8 0E 0D 04 F5 21 A0 94 53 2B 97 F5 D6 4E 39 30 -- TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to [EMAIL PROTECTED] . Trouble? e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] .