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How I hacked a vintage C++ compiler to support exceptions before they were standard
Posted on Jul 19 2024
![](http://ignaciomellado.es/!!cms/verbose-code-without-exceptions.png)
TL;DR I hacked a 28-year-old C++ compiler to support exceptions. That’s two years before exceptions were even part of the first C++ standard!
The compiler is the Watcom C++32 Optimizing Compiler Version 11.0, from 1996, by Sybase, Inc. Around that time, some friends and I started a real-time graphics [...]
Fig. 1: The Watcom C++32 Optimizing Compiler Version 11.0 running on DOSBox.
Years later, I resumed maintaining the library. Real-time code was mostly written in assembly, but I started adding C++ support to integrate faster. However, with error checking everywhere, the code started [...]