Plans for ABI migration

[Gerald Pfeifer]

On Wed, 10 Jan 2001, Bernardo Innocenti wrote:
> Yes, I was thinking that the gcc developers could get in contact with
> the glibc guys to discuss a coordinated effort to let ld.so recognize
> ELF modules compiled by the new compiler.

You are aware that GCC runs of dozens of platforms that do not use glibc
(several of which are also free software)?

>   - gas preserves it into the ELF object module

And dozens of platforms which do not use gas, either because it is not
available there by default or because it just has not been ported/does
not work properly there?

> Even if I'm used to compile stuff from source code, I always disliked
> the UNIX notorious lack of binary compatibility between kernel
> versions (BSD) or library versions (Linux). There's certainly room
> for improvement.

While there *is* room for improvement, you would be surprised by the
level of compatibility that Sun, for example, has been offering with
SunOS and Solaris. Also modern decendants of BSD like FreeBSD offer
excellent backwards compatibility (I just tried and ran an old a.out
binary, orginally generated for FreeBSD 2.x on a FreeBSD 4.2 system).

But, what I actually mean to say is: While GNU/Linux is very important
to the GNU project and GCC should support it as well as possible, there
are lots of other (free) systems out there which we have to consider.

And I don't think there's a solution with a good cost:gain ratio in
general even for GNU/Linux platforms. Breaking the C++ ABI has been
happening for every major release of GCC in the past, and in fact we
hope that this will be the last time for a long time that we'll have
to do so, due to the new C++ ABI.

Gerald
-- 
Gerald "Jerry" pfeifer@dbai.tuwien.ac.at http://www.dbai.tuwien.ac.at/~pfeifer/