Re: backwards compatibility/cross-compiler compatibility

[Nathan Myers <ncm@best.com>]

> > The most obvious issues are name mangling of symbols, vtables,
> > and calling conventions.
> 
> But there are tons of other aspects: ...

Inlines and virtual calls build into your ".o" files knowledge of 
library implementation details.  It's because of these library-level 
version incompatibilies that compiler version incompatibilities aren't 
worried about so much as in C, and we can talk about (e.g.) -fnew-abi.

The result is that C++ libraries must get a new "major version"
-- or name -- with each release, until things get very stable.  
Even then you will have to know which ABI it was built with.

Nathan Myers
ncm@cantrip.org