Question

Visual C++ has a compiler setting “Enable C++ Exceptions” which can be set to “No”. What exactly will happen if I set it this way? My code never explicitly throws or catches exceptions (and therefore the first thrown exception will terminate the program anyway) and doesn’t rely on stack unwinding – should I expect any more undesired behaviour from the recompiled program?

Answer 1

The MSDN documentation of the setting explains the different exception modes and even gives code examples to show the difference between the different modes. Furthermore, this article might be interesting, even though it’s pretty old.

Bottom line: The option basically enables or disables the tracking of the life-spans of all your objects. Such tracking is required, because in the case of an exception, all the proper destructors need to be called, the stack has to be unwinded, and a lot of clean up is done. Such tracking requires organizational overhead (= additional code) – this can be dropped by setting the option to “No”.

I haven’t tried by myself, but it looks like you still can throw and catch exceptions if the option is set to “No”, but the clean up and unwinding is missing, which might have very bad consequences (not recommended 😉 ..