C++ ABI Issues

[Richard Earnshaw]

>  >Maybe the flag should be -fabi-gcc-3.2 .  If true, we are compatible with
>  >GCC 3.2; if false, we include as many bug fixes as we have to ABI conformance
>  >at the time.  It would be true by default until we have reasonable
>  >confidence that we've converged, and I think we need six months to achieve
>  >such confidence, assuming that we do some rigorous testing in that time.
> Agreed.

Well, I'd prefer a flag of the form -fabi=gcc-3.2 then we could easily 
extend that to any later version.  It's also then clear that you can't 
specify more than one such flag (or -fno-abi-gcc-3.2).

Finally, we could then also have -fabi=std meaning compile to the standard 
(well, more precisely, don't do anything we know to violate the ABI).

R.