On Tue, Oct 24, 2000 at 11:20:26PM +0100, Stuart Brady wrote: > Silly question maybe, but why would we care about compatability between > compilers' object files if we've got the source?
Well, if you have something which takes five hours to compile on your machine or 20 minutes to download the pre-compiled version, you might be tempted to go for the latter. And then discover that it's not compatible with anything else you compile because you've got a slightly different version of the compiler... Or maybe you've upgraded your compiler since you last compiled a particular shared library, and now none of your new programs will link to it. I have Licq running on my Solaris box. It's a Qt application. Licq and Qt are both written in C++. But Qt won't compile with GNU c++ because it includes Sun's broken OpenWindows header files and GNU c++ objects to them. And Licq must be compiled with GNU c++ because the Sun Workshop c++ compiler doesn't have the required stdc++ library. Put them together and what do you get? Unresolved symbols. Fortunately I've managed to hack Qt to use X11R6 header files instead of OpenWindows ones, and thus compiled it with GNU c++. imc
