Fragile ABI

R Grocott rgrocottbugzilla at gmail.com
Thu Aug 16 07:58:22 PDT 2012


http://michelf.ca/blog/2009/some-ideas-for-dynamic-vtables-in-d/

The above blog post, written in 2009, proposes a system for 
solving the Fragile ABI Problem in D. Just wondering whether 
anything like this is a planned feature for druntime.

C++'s fragile ABI makes it very difficult to write class 
libraries without some sort of workaround. For example, RapidXML 
and AGG are distributed as source code; GDI+ is a header-only 
wrapper over an underlying C interface; and Qt makes heavy use of 
the Pimpl idiom, which makes its source code much more complex 
than it needs to be. This is also a major problem for any program 
which wants to expose a plugin API.

It would be nice if D could sidestep this issue. It's frustrating 
that C is currently the only real option for developing native 
libraries without worrying about their ABI.


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