kosak opened a new pull request, #13775: URL: https://github.com/apache/arrow/pull/13775
When a user's C++ program links to both Arrow and an installation of the Flatbuffers library, the program can crash or send corrupt Arrow messages. The reason for this is version incompatibility between the vendored (and trimmed-down) version of Flatbuffers that lives inside Arrow, and whatever version the user is using. The community seems to be aware of this issue, at least as it impacts Java: ARROW-5579 In C++, the problem is especially pernicious because it is not even diagnosed at build time (e.g. by duplicate linker symbols). The methods being used are templates and so their definitions are emitted as weak symbols by the compiler. As we all know, when a weak symbol is defined in two different compilation units, the linker assumes their definitions are identical and it will just pick one. Here, the result is that either Arrow or the user program gets different Flatbuffers code than what it expected, and the program crashes. Arrow doesn't even advertise the version of Flatbuffers that it vendored so it's impossible for the user to even ameliorate this problem. In any case, it would be a little unfriendly to force the user to use that exact version of Flatbuffers even if it could be identified. The good news is that there is an easy workaround. Arrow C++ doesn't export Flatbuffers as part of its public interface. Instead, it just uses it internally, as an implementation detail. Therefore it is easy to just move the vendored Flatbuffers from the namespace "flatbuffers" to some other private namespace. In my PR, I change the namespace to `arrow_thirdparty_flatbuffer`. Then I create a namespace alias which makes `flatbuffers` an alias for `arrow_thirdparty_flatbuffers`. The net result is that (thanks to the new namespace) the symbols exported by the linker are in the "private" namespace `arrow_thirdparty_flatbuffers`, and therefore don't conflict with any other flatbuffers, but (thanks to the alias) the calling code in the rest of the Arrow library doesn't have to change at all. You might prefer a nested namespace instead, such as `arrow::thirdparty::flatbuffers`, or some other choice. -- This is an automated message from the Apache Git Service. To respond to the message, please log on to GitHub and use the URL above to go to the specific comment. To unsubscribe, e-mail: github-unsubscr...@arrow.apache.org For queries about this service, please contact Infrastructure at: us...@infra.apache.org
