documenting C++ and libstdc++ ABI issues

[Janis Johnson]

On Tue, Aug 27, 2002 at 07:16:43PM +0100, Joseph S. Myers wrote:
> On Tue, 27 Aug 2002, Janis Johnson wrote:
> 
> > I'd like to formalize the documentation about C++ ABI conformance and
> > libstdc++ consistency.  I'll start with my notes from
> > http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2002-08/msg01251.html and Benjamin's doc at
> > http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/libstdc++/abi.txt .  It will incorporate
> > pieces of the Interoperation section of the GCC Manual; that section is
> > currently under "Known Causes of Trouble" and looks horribly out of date
> 
> There are at least two GCC manual sections relating to ABIs.  The
> appropriate one to expand with non-C information (linking to appropriate
> external documents) is probably that in the internals manual in
> interface.texi.

This information is of interest to GCC users, not just developers, so
it should be in the GCC manual rather than the internals manual.

>  As with that in trouble.texi, it suffers from documenting
> information about old systems that few people use GCC on and not current
> information about the ABIs for currently used systems.  (There may be
> information in both those sections that relates *only* to systems for
> which support has been removed; any such information should be removed.)

What's a good way to get the appropriate people to review and update
this information?

> Explicit references to the external ABI specifications followed for C for
> at least the current primary release platforms, and any known deviations
> from those, and any extensions, would also be useful.

Good point.
> 
> > (example: "The GNU assembler (GAS) does not support PIC").
> 
> It has been suggested this is still true for some a.out BSD systems (for
> which the relevant support was never merged into GNU binutils).

Then the statement should be clarified when the section is reviewed.

Thanks for your input.

Janis