[Qt-interest] Qt and C++ exceptions

[Andreas Pakulat]

On 23.05.09 12:21:08, Piotr Dobrogost wrote:
> Andreas Pakulat wrote:
> 
> > Then you apparently never came across MSVC6, that compiler is just soo
> > strange in what it accepts as proper source and what not, its a mystery
> > to me that people paid money for it.
> 
> Ok, when are you going to drop support for MSVC6?

I'm not going to drop anything as I don't work at QtSoftware :) Anyway,
MSVC6 already has been dropped for some of the new utility libraries in
Qt, but dropping it for all of Qt might get QtSoftware into trouble with
some of their larger customers as those tend to upgrade compilers only
very seldomly and sometimes code even depends on quirks that are
specific to a given compiler...

> Are you going to introduce exceptions after dropping it?

See above, I'm not doing any of these decisions.

> >> So I think it would
> >> be wise to consider support for exceptions to be one of the most
> >> important tasks.
> > 
> > Well, Qt lives quite some time without exceptions and even grew quite a
> > bit in that time. So apparently there hasn't been an extensive need for
> > exceptions thus far, so no urgend need to introduce them now.
> 
> Sorry, no logic here.
> No offense here, but I hate when someone says something is good just
> because it's being used... This way MFC is the best GUI library ever and
> there's no need for any other :)

My point is that so far there hasn't been a need to introduce exceptions
into the core Qt library and thus there needs to be benefit for the Qt
library to introduce exceptions and that needs to outweigh the possible
problems (think of exceptions propagated back into the event loop for
example).

> I totally agree with Maxim; C++ library not using exceptions in the year
> 2009 (11 years after they were standardized in 1998) is a great mistake.

For a newly written C++ library that doesn't have any "old cruft" in
itself or in the environments it needs to support that might very well
be the case. But for something that has grown over more than a decade
its hard to justify dropping old cruft, possibly backward compatibility
and introducing completely new ways of how the library is to be used. Qt
did a huge change between Qt3 and Qt4 dropping quite some old stuff and
changing behaviour in a lot of places and that got a lot of users quite
pissed.

Andreas
 
-- 
You will inherit millions of dollars.