dynamic_cast with RTTI disabled

Question

I'm curious to know what happens when compiling code with a dynamic cast whith RTTI disabled (either with -fno-rttion GCC or with /GR- on visual studio). Does the compiler "falls back" to static_cast ? Since (at least on VS) it does only issue a warning, what will the compiled code do ?

More specifically, what bad things could happen if I compile without RTTI a code where I'm sure that there are no error possible with dynamic_cast (i.e. where dynamic_cast could be safely replaced by a static_cast) like this one :

class A{ /*...*/ } ;
class B : public A {
    int foo() { return 42 ;}
} ;
//...
A * myA = new B() ;
int bar = (dynamic_cast<B*>(myA))->foo() ;

Answer 1

Reading the standard, in 5.2.7/6 we find that unless the target is an unambiguous base of the source, source must be a polymorphic type. Then in 10.3/1

Virtual functions support dynamic binding and objectoriented programming. A class that declares or inherits a virtual function is called a polymorphic class.

In other words the standard doesn't seem to say anything about your question. In this case, the standard doesn't allow for a compiler to turn off RTTI so for each compiler you need to check its documentation to see what would happen. Based on this reading, I think this is a compiler question, not a C++ language question as the tag indicates.

Alternately you can avoid the problem completely by just using static_cast when you know it's sufficient.