Re: C++
On Feb 23, 3:56 pm, Rolf Magnus <ramag...@t-online.de> wrote:
Pete Becker wrote:
On 2008-02-23 07:14:51 -0500, Juha Nieminen
<nos...@thanks.invalid> said:
If name mangling was standardized, it would greatly
increase the usability of C++ to create shared and
precompiled libraries usable among different compilers.
Name mangling is one of several problems in getting
different compilers to work together. You also need to agree
on object layout, calling conventions, and, perhaps,
register usage.
Don't forget things like exception handling and details like
dynamic initialization of global objects or NRVO. And then,
there is the standard library. If name mangling is the same,
you can't link standard libraries of two different compilers
together, but each compiler uses its own headers, so I
wouldn't expect code compiled to run with one standard library
implementation to work with another.
Note that both of the compilers I regularly use (Sun CC and
g++) have two variants of the standard library; which one gets
used depends on invocation options. And the variants aren't
compatible. And don't affect name mangling. (I've already
spent some time tracking down errors in programs compiled with
g++ because the main code was compiled with -D_GLIBCXX_DEBUG et
al., but one of the libraries wasn't; I suspect that you would
get the same problems with Sun CC using -library=stlport4 or
not. (And I think VC++ has similar problems.)
These are all platform specific, so there's no universal
solution that handles all of them.
I'd say most parts don't really need to be different for
different platforms. There even is a more-or-less-standard
ABI, but there are just a lot of compilers that don't support
it.
There is a standard ABI for one platform, I think. There's
certainly not one for Sparc, nor for Windows. (And for Windows
on a PC, there's only an informal one: what g++ uses.)
--
James Kanze (GABI Software) email:james.kanze@gmail.com
Conseils en informatique orient=E9e objet/
Beratung in objektorientierter Datenverarbeitung
9 place S=E9mard, 78210 St.-Cyr-l'=C9cole, France, +33 (0)1 30 23 00 34