With "-fno-exceptions", what happens with "new T"?

I was wondering, will new T still throw bad_alloc if I compile my program using the -fno-exceptions option to disable exception handling?

Or will the compiler (GCC and clang support that option) implicitly transform the use of new T to new (nothrow) T?

Solution 1:

The way I understand it, operator new is defined by libstdc++. If you now compile your own code with -fno-exceptions, you cannot catch any exceptions, but you will still be linking against the normal version of libstdc++, which does throw an exception.

So yes, new T will throw an exception, even with -fno-exception.

However, if you compiled libstdc++ with -fno-exception as well, things become different. Now, new T cannot throw an exception but, if I read the libstdc++ manual right it will call abort() instead.

It seems that, if you want your new T to return NULL on failure, the only way is to explicitely specify nothrow...

Solution 2:

I can't give a definitive answer to all the perks around -fno-exceptions, just the observations on a 32 bit linux machine, gcc 4.5.1 - bad_alloc is thrown with and without -fno-exceptions

[21:38:35 1 ~/tmp] $ cat bad_alloc.cpp

int main()
{
    char* c = new char[4000000000U];
}
[21:38:58 1 ~/tmp] $ g++ bad_alloc.cpp
[21:39:06 1 ~/tmp] $ ./a.out
terminate called after throwing an instance of 'std::bad_alloc'
  what():  std::bad_alloc
Aborted
[21:39:07 1 ~/tmp] $ g++ -fno-exceptions bad_alloc.cpp
[21:39:16 1 ~/tmp] $ ./a.out
terminate called after throwing an instance of 'std::bad_alloc'
  what():  std::bad_alloc
Aborted

Solution 3:

It's not a definitive answer, but the GCC Manual (see the section "Doing Without") has this:

Before detailing the library support for -fno-exceptions, first a passing note on the things lost when this flag is used: it will break exceptions trying to pass through code compiled with -fno-exceptions whether or not that code has any try or catch constructs. If you might have some code that throws, you shouldn't use -fno-exceptions.

The way I read that, you might have to explicitly ask for the nothrow version of new to be completely safe.