A gentle critque..

[Brad Roberts]

On Wed, 17 May 2006, dennis luehring wrote:

> > The format for OBJ files (OMF I believe) is on microsoft's msdn site. I
> > don't
> > know how current it is. 
> 
> the obj file format is just one part of the way - i don't found any vc related
> abi descriptions? have microsoft ever released an offical c++ abi description?
> 
> > However, I'm talking only about gcc's object file
> > format.
> 
> g++ has the most unstable c++ abi in the hole c++ compiler world
> the gcc c++ abi changes from version to version - i think ~100 times :-) since
> 2.9xxx
> the abi for the 4.x seem to become a "little bit" more stable

Since gcc 3.0 that's not been true.  The abi adopted with gcc 3.0 and 
beyond is based on a spec that's been agreed upon by all the major unix 
compiler vendors.  There's been a few fixes primarily in 3.2 and 3.3 (if I 
remember right) to fix some corner cases.  Since 3.4 there haven't been 
any major abi changes that I can recall.  The same can be said of the hp, 
sun, ibm, etc compilers.. their first releases of the new abi weren't 
perfect either.  For the last several years, each has been stable and 
compatible.

The only major vendor today that _doesn't_ support this abi is microsoft 
(and borland if you want to count them).

Later,
Brad