Fragile ABI

[Paulo Pinto]

On Thursday, 16 August 2012 at 14:58:23 UTC, R Grocott wrote:
> 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.

The is only so, because in most mainstream OSs, the C ABI is the 
OS ABI.

If you make use of an OS written in, lets say Modula-2, then the 
OS ABI
would be a Modula-2 ABI, which even C would have to comply to 
somehow.

I think z/OS, if I'm not mistaken on the OS, is one of the few OS 
where
you have a good ABI across multiple languages.

This is similar to what Microsoft somehow tries to achieve with 
COM and .NET.

--
Paulo