C++ ABI Issues

[Jeff Law]

In message < hoadn8to72.fsf@gee.suse.de >, Andreas Jaeger writes:
 >Mark Mitchell <mark@codesourcery.com> writes:
 >
 >> [...]
 >> Certainly, one reasonable position is to do nothing.  Another is to
 >> (as several have suggested) support both modes (which seems like
 >> a good idea to me).  Another is my initial suggestion (to fix the
 >> problems right away.)  To me, the best argument for my suggestion is
 >> that at this point there aren't too many people dependent on 3.2; the
 >> longer we leave it around the harder it may to be change it later.
 >
 >It's too late already. Some distributors, AFAIR including Mandrake and
 >Red Hat - have planned to switch to GCC 3.2 in August and announced
 >this during the discussion about 3.2.  SuSE has just done the step
 >internally and it's too late for such major changes, I don't think
 >that you can release a tested compiler with those bugfixes in a
 >timeframe that would make us happy.
Red Hat is in the same position.   It's simply too late in our process to
switch to a new compiler ABI.

It's unfortunate, but not unexpected that we found ABI issues in GCC 3.2.
Everyone's life would be better if that hadn't happened, but it's not the
end of the world.  

I do think this situation highlights how important it is that we build
testers for the ABI.  In fact, when I look into the future, I think that
having a comprehensive ABI testsuite that the compiler passes should be 
a release critera.  I don't know if we'll have all that in place for 
GCC 3.3, but I would hope that we'd have it in place by GCC 3.4.


jeff