>> So with all this it sounds that current protected visibility is just >> broken and we should forgo with it, making it equal to default >> visibility? > > Like how? You mean in GCC regarding protected as default visibility? No, > that's just throwing out the baby with the water. We should make > protected do what it was intended to do and accept that not all invariants > that are true for default visible symbols are also true for protected > symbols, possibly by ... > >> At least I couldn't decipher a solution that solves all of the issues >> with protected visibility apart from trying to error at link-time (or >> runtime?) for the cases that are tricky (impossible?) to solve. > > ... this.
Right. Protected visibility worked fine without copy relocations for 15 years until HJ's patch. I don't know of anyone with a legitimate complaint about that until HJ filed a bug based on his artificial test case. Other compilers implement protected the way it was intended, so the linkers must still disallow copy relocations against protected symbols, or we get legitimate complaints like these: https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=15228 https://sourceware.org/ml/binutils/2016-03/msg00312.html -cary
