This is the mail archive of the
gcc@gcc.gnu.org
mailing list for the GCC project.
Re: C++ binary compatibility between GCC 3.1 and GCC 3.2?
"H. J. Lu" wrote:
>
> On Fri, Jul 05, 2002 at 02:46:11PM -0700, David O'Brien wrote:
> > On Fri, Jul 05, 2002 at 02:35:34PM -0700, H. J. Lu wrote:
> > > IMHO, keep the C++ ABI compatibility between 3.1 and 3.1.x, but break
> > > between 3.1.x and 3.2, is one of the worst things anyone can do to gcc.
> >
> > Why? Both Andreas said that the change happening 3.1.1->3.2 will cause
> > problems in upcoming OS releases. You didn't give any reasoning for your
> > position.
>
> My position is I doubt many people really case the C++ ABI compatibility
> between 3.1 and 3.1.1, at least I don't. I can even pretend 3.1 never
> existed :-(.
Apple is going to care a lot. Jaguar is all based on 3.1, and it's
likely that some developer tool releases are going to use 3.1.1 or
later, in which case it's imperative that 3.1 and 3.1.x all be
binary compatible.
3.2 is a ways off still, who knows what kind of compatibility it
will have in the end. It's even possible that we or somebody else
will work up a patch to provide a runtime choice between 3.1 and
3.2 ABI - Apple's GCC already has terrible ugly patches to optionally
emulate parts of the 2.95 ABI, but they (along with some ugly kernel
hackery) make it possible for existing 0S X 10.1 drivers to "just work"
on Jaguar, so they're worth the extra trouble.
Stan