On 2/19/19 2:44 PM, Thomas Koenig wrote:
Bob,

Some of us still use varargs interfaces (in my case, Fortran calling C
stdarg subroutines).

The problem for us is that that sometimes using varargs made standard-
conforming Fortran code like, in file a.f

        subroutine foo(a)
        print *,a
        end

and in file main.f

        programme main
        call foo(1.0)
        end

depend ABI details: The call to foo used to be called using
the varargs convention, and the subroutine foo was compiled
as a non-varargs function.

This "worked" until PR 87689 showed that this breaks
standard-conforming Fortran code on a primary gcc platform.

I don't know if that makes a difference for the platform you work
on.  For the System V AMD64 ABI, I suspect it actually might not
matter (at least from glancing at the corresponding Wikipedia
article), but I am _not_ an expert in this field, so please take this
with a chunk of rock salt of appropriate size.

So, we cannot really keep this as a feature (note that varargs
are also not C interoperable).

Okay. But I hope you don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. That particular platform is not a concern for us, so if you break it there I'm not happy, but it's not the end of the world either. But please don't break it other places just because it doesn't work on that one platform. I know it's not good design practice to have that kind of platform-dependent behavior, but sometimes practicalities force less than ideal choices.

Thanks...

-Bob

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