Garrett D'Amore wrote: > Will the implementation take care to preserve the *existing* functions > so that the above inline (which will now have been compiled into various > applications) will continue to function, regardless of what other > changes may be necessary for the class?
The materials Stefan has submitted state that the Apache C++StdLib project has made the commitment to not muck up these types of implementation details in any but one of their major releases. That is, even though the incompatibly evolving C++ language definitions and associated rickety scaffolding may allow one to shoot themselves in the foot, and their code could be evolved in ways that would expose such runtime binary incompatibilities, they explicitly promise not to do so within a certain set of release naming boundaries. What more can the ARC ask? This is exactly what we do with goode olde libc. The only difference is that the C++ world allows for (and oddly, seems rather comfortable with) incompatible future versions. At that point, the Apache Standard C++ Library would need to rev its HNAME and .so versioning info, but again, this is exactly what we did with libc. My only disconnect here was our left and right hands not talking to each other, and now that Stefan and Steve are exchanging email, I'm not even very worried about that - though I'm sure someone will let me know if/when I should start worrying again :-) -John
