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Re: backwards compatibility/cross-compiler compatibility
FWIW, a number of compiler vendors (including Cygnus) have started meeting
recently to discuss the possibility of a common ABI for ia64 toolchains.
At the first meeting, Mike Ball of Sun asserted that "release-to-release
compatibility is a chimera". Apparently they and SGI both have tried to
set up schemes for backwards compatibility of their libraries, but have
since abandoned them as unworkable.
The problem is that for STL, or any other template library, the ABI is
basically the whole library. This could change with support for separate
compilation, but that is the current state of affairs. As a result, I
don't think that trying to maintain compatibility between versions of STL
is of a high priority.
The ABI group is focusing on compatibility between compilers for code
written for the freestanding library before we try to tackle the full
library.
Jason