[infinispan-dev] ABI compatibility of C++ client

[Radim Vansa]

I was expecting at least some response.

Cliff, Ion, Tristan, Vladimir, could you share your opinions?

Radim

On 04/25/2014 02:26 PM, Radim Vansa wrote:
> Hi guys,
>
> as I've tried to get rid of all the warnings emitted in Windows build of
> C++ HotRod client, I've noticed that the ABI of this library is not very
> well designed.
> I am not an expert for this kind of stuff, but many sources I've found
> say that exporting STL containers (such as string or vector, or
> shared_ptr) is not ABI-safe.
>
> For windows, the STL export is allowed [1] when both library and user
> application is linked against the same version of CRT. I am really not
> sure whether we want to force it to the user, and moreover, due to bug
> in VC10 implementation of STL [2] we can't explicitly export shared_ptr
> (I haven't found any workaround for that so far).
>
> Regarding the GCC-world, situation is not better. The usual response for
> exporting STL classes is "don't do that". It is expected that these
> trouble will be addressed in C++17 (huh :)).
>
> What can we do about that? Fixing this requires a lot of changes in
> API... can we afford to do that now? Or will we just declare "compile
> with the same versions and compile options as we did"? (we should state
> them, then)
>
> I have only limited knowledge of the whole C++ ecosystem, if I am wrong,
> I'd be gladly corrected.
>
> Radim
>
> [1] http://support.microsoft.com/kb/168958
> [2] http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/649531
>


-- 
Radim Vansa <rvansa at redhat.com>
JBoss DataGrid QA