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Re: GCC 6 symbol poisoning and c++ header usage is fragile
- From: Szabolcs Nagy <szabolcs dot nagy at arm dot com>
- To: Jonathan Wakely <jwakely dot gcc at gmail dot com>
- Cc: "gcc at gcc dot gnu dot org" <gcc at gcc dot gnu dot org>, nd <nd at arm dot com>, Rich Felker <dalias at libc dot org>, Michael Matz <matz at suse dot de>
- Date: Thu, 21 Apr 2016 13:33:46 +0100
- Subject: Re: GCC 6 symbol poisoning and c++ header usage is fragile
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On 21/04/16 12:52, Jonathan Wakely wrote:
> On 21 April 2016 at 12:11, Szabolcs Nagy wrote:
>> the root cause is c++: c++ headers include random libc headers with
>> _GNU_SOURCE ftm so all sorts of unexpected symbols are defined/declared.
>
> Yes, I'd really like to be able to stop defining _GNU_SOURCE
> unconditionally. It needs some libstdc++ and glibc changes for that to
> happen, I'll be looking at it for gcc 7.
>
>
>> since it's unlikely the c++ standard gets fixed (to properly specify
>> the namespace rules)
>
> Fixed how? What's wrong with the rules? (I'd like to understand what's
> wrong here before I try to change anything, and I don't understand the
> comment above).
>
posix has "namespace rules" specifying what symbols
are reserved for the implementation when certain
headers are included.
(it's not entirely trivial, i have a collected list
http://port70.net/~nsz/c/posix/reserved.txt
http://port70.net/~nsz/c/posix/README.txt
i use for testing musl headers, glibc also does
such namespace checks.)
e.g. the declared function names in a header are
reserved to be defined as macros.
c++ does not specify how its headers interact with
posix headers except for a few c standard headers
where it requires no macro definition for functions
(and imposes some other requirements on the libc
like being valid c++ syntax, using extern "C" where
appropriate etc).
so from a libc implementor's point of view, including
libc headers into c++ code is undefined behaivour
(neither posix nor c++ specifies what should happen).
without a specification libc headers just piling
#ifdef __cplusplus hacks when ppl run into problems.
e.g. c++ code uses ::pthread_equal(a,b), but musl used
a macro for pthread_equal (the only sensible
implementation is (a)==(b), this has to be suppressed
for c++, which now uses an extern call to do the
same), i'm also pretty sure a large number of c++
code would break if unistd.h defined "read", "write",
"link" etc as macros, since these are often used as
method names in c++, but this would be a conforming
libc implementation.