Re: HPUX C++ ABI

[Stan Shebs <shebs at apple dot com>]

Matt Austern wrote:

> On Thursday, September 12, 2002, at 03:11 PM, Stan Shebs wrote:
>
> > But speaking seriously, we Appleites deal with corporate pressure
> > to support various hacks by maintaining our own version of GCC and
> > taking on all the costs that go with that, so I'm wondering why it
> > is that HP can't do the same.  While I personally don't have a problem
> > doing a little favor for HP, it's going to be really tricky to avoid
> > charges of favoritism and bias later on if, say, some Apple feature is
> > shot down.
>
> Alternatively, maybe the answer is that features like -fapple-kext
> really should go into the mainline tree.  It wouldn't change the ABI
> on any platform other than OS X, and it would be very helpful for
> us.
>             --Matt
QED. :-)  -fapple-kext is a really good example of something that
would be helpful for us, and a nightmare for everybody else, because
what it does is to emulate enough of the 2.95 ABI to let 2.95-compiled
C++-written drivers be usable from 3.x-compiled base classes in the
kernel (that's how we got binary compat for drivers from 10.1 to
10.2), all arrived at empirically by hacking until all the drivers
loaded.  No way to really test it unless you're an OS X driver wiz,
so it's not reasonable to ask all the GCC developers to keep this
functionality intact while working on the C++ frontend.

Stan