[gephex-devel] As promised, a few more questions

[Martin Bayer]

[Georg Seidel]
> For 2: I'm not quite sure about the status of this. You could say:
> "I don't mind, I'm only using gcc on linux", then you would not care.
> We, however, at the moment also support the microsoft visual c++
> compiler on win32. (Martin should know more details about name
> mangling...)

Name mangling is the smallest problem of c++ abi compatibility. There are
other issues like object layout, exception handling, stack layout ...

The compilers for non-windows platform converge atm against the [1] abi. 
On the windows platform most commercial compilers follow the visual c++ 
compiler. Otherwise it wouldn't be possible to use COM. The gcc in mingw 
and cygwin is problematic as it implements the [1] api. There were a lot 
of discussions about supporting the ms api but to my knowledge there 
isn't much progress (please correct me if i'm wrong).

The compilers for the Mac platform[2][3] are also changing to [1].

With the success of the new C++ abi industrial standard [1] the problems 
on the unix platforms will disappear. The gcc on the windows platform 
will stay problematic.


The other problem is the stl. There are a lot of incompatible stl
implementations and versions included with compilers. Using std::list or
std::string in the interface would render it quite impossible to mix
different compilers with their stdlibs.

Martin

[1]
http://www.codesourcery.com/cxx-abi/

[2] 
http://www.metrowerks.com/MW/Develop/Desktop/Macintosh/Professional/Mac9.htm

[3] 
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/DeveloperTools/gcc-3.3/gcc/index.html
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