[Jack O'Quin]
Anticlimax: ;-)
Our hero sees the error of his ways. Eschewing the grotesque
compromises imposed on C++ by its quixotic quest (??) for "Object
Oriented Programming Without Garbage Collection" (OOPWGC), he returns
to sanity, living happily ever after, writing robust, portable
programs in C, "the world's most widely used assembly language", where
what you see is what you get, regardless of the underlying platform
and compiler.
The trouble with our surely no less quixotic hero (coming up with this
drama has made me know him so well I could sometimes swear he's alive)
is that he's lazy, and he's gotten addicted to the seductions of
cleverness, always looking for ways to evade the load of work that a
more modest way imposes on the aspiring.
So, he's a bit reluctant to go back to the verbose and honest ways of
plain C. He might even have trouble fluently reading and writing
25-character identifiers, so shortened is his patience and so
re-evolved his typing.
I'm not a big fan of turning this case into a tragedy, so I'm quite
hopeful there'll be Part II to be played to the same public, in which
this conflict will be ultimately resolved.
Indeed. I feel your pain. (And, you haven't really explored the full
range of ABI incompatibility problems.)
Nor would I care to :) though what I've experienced is enough to
affect the full range of what I used to think of as a main work, the
effects being pretty much the equivalent of a nuclear blast to be
precise. I've looked up a bit of the public documentation of the
vtable movement decision process when gcc 3 was in the works, and the
only clearly stated reason seems the Solaris compiler having the habit
of placing the vtable at this + 0. Maybe I should have delved deeper
in the hope of finding a better reason but reading that somehow made
me turn my interest elsewhere; the prospect of fighting this decision
seemed unattractive anyway (gcc 3.3 was already shipped so late was I
to notice).
However, I'm constantly rethinking the way I make music and how I use
the computer to aid me, so the next attempt, if there'll be one, can
reflect newly found concepts.
Thanks for the good words,
Tim
