A gentle critque..

[Ben Cooley]

In article <e4gvun$hg2$1 at digitaldaemon.com>, dennis luehring says...
>
>Brad Roberts schrieb:
>> On Wed, 17 May 2006, dennis luehring wrote:
>>>> 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.
>
>ok, ok ("~100 times" was a joke) but there are enough small changes in 
>the last years to call the (*nix) c++ abi still unstable - do you think 
>the abi is nowerdays stable enough to become integrated into the D linker?
>
>> The only major vendor today that _doesn't_ support this abi is microsoft 
>> (and borland if you want to count them).
>
>a D features to link c++ code without these two major vendors makes 
>absolutly no sens (to me) - where can i find docs about there abis

Interesting that you would say that.  Not being able to use any existing C or
Cpp at all makes even less sense to me. 

The point is that I can write software in D on any platform supported by GDC and
use any C or Cpp library that can be compiled by GCC on Windows, Linux, or OSX.
How many usage scenarios do you think that would cover?

As far as the original D compiler Walter wrote.. it won't be compatible with
projects written for GDC code which used Cpp interop.