title: Do I really need libgcc?
body: <p>I've been using GCC 4.6.2 on Mac OS X 10.6. I use the -static-libgcc option when I compile, otherwise my binaries look for libgcc on the system and I'm not sure anything over GCC 4.2 is supported on OS X. This works fine, but why do I even need libgcc? I read up on it and the GNU docs say it contains "arithmetic operations that the target processor cannot perform directly." How do I know what these operations are? And why are they so complex that I need to include this library? Why can't GCC just optimize the code directly instead of having to resort to these library functions? I'm a little confused. Any insight into this would be appreciated!</p>