Wine, Mozilla & IE ?

Dan Kegel dank at kegel.com
Fri Jan 10 14:12:50 CST 2003


Francois Gouget wrote:
> On Fri, 10 Jan 2003, Dan Kegel wrote:
>>(There was one little ABI tweak between 3.2 and 3.3,
>>and there may be more later, but they probably
>>won't break many apps.)
> 
> That too seems incompatible with something declared 'stable'.
> 
> Not that I have anything against C++, I like OO programming. But these
> g++ compatibility issues have been like a cold shower.

Yes, indeed.  But things are looking *much* better.  As I mentioned
in my links, there's now an ABI standard that all c++ compilers
can conform to, and at least Intel, SGI, and Gnu are all trying very
hard to conform to it.  gcc 3.0 was the first gcc to try to conform;
gcc 3.2 fixed a bunch of conformance problems; gcc 3.3 fixed a couple
tiny ones that became evident after 3.2 was released.

> <rant class="my opinion only">
>>From the point of vue of an ISV, distributing a Wine binary is already
> enough trouble with the C library changing their internal implementation
> (which of course they are absolutely free to do since it's *internal*)
> and FreeType breaking backwards compatibility in minor releases, but if
> ISVs also have to deal with g++ changing their ABI on a regular basis...
> Well, I guess ISVs could always compile these libraries with Visual C++
> and ship them as Windows dlls and thus benefit from a stable and Wine
> compatible ABI...
> </rant>

The g++ ABI will *not* change on a regular basis.  It is rapidly
converging on the portable C++ ABI shared by several vendors,
and defined in a standards document.

- Dan

-- 
Dan Kegel
Linux User #78045
http://www.kegel.com




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