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Re: Virtual Base Bug
Martin,
Per your suggestion I've reviewed the mailing list archive. I also took a
look at the GCC source.
I am, of course, disappointed that code that Borland's 16-bit compiler
could handle in '92 is beyond EGCS's capabilities in '99. However, I can't
complain much as I haven't contributed any code to GCC.
What amazed me is that the problem has been known about for ages, is not
mentioned in the documentation, is not mentioned in the list of known bugs
on the web site, and the failure situation is detected by the compiler and
ignored without even a warning. A common sense approach to any one of
these could have saved me about fifteen hours work producing a simple test
case from a complex program. I see several others have gone through the
same exercise and there are presumably many more who encountered the
problem but didn't have the time to isolate a test case.
The workaround of recompiling Linux, Glibc2, and everything else with
-fno-vtable-thunks is not an option as the resulting program would be
binary incompatible with the current state of the rest of the universe.
What I can't understand is why the defaults were not fixed long ago to
remove this insidious trap.
As a sanity check, I reviewed the new mission statement on the web site.
Sure enough, reliability and correctness are not listed goals.
Do you think 2.7.2 would work?
--Mike
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