Re: [boost] [Boost.DLL] Formal Review request

Subject: Re: [boost] [Boost.DLL] Formal Review request
From: Andrey Semashev (andrey.semashev_at_[hidden])
Date: 2014-10-04 04:41:36

On Friday 03 October 2014 23:59:03 Niall Douglas wrote:
> On 3 Oct 2014 at 19:09, Andrey Semashev wrote:
> > 
> > I think any such technique is non-portable since there is no portable way
> > to obtain mangled name of a function in compile time.
> 
> Who cares.

I do, obviously.

> All the major compilers do provide this, and a large
> number of the minor ones. When myself and Antony surveyed the
> situation during TypeIndex we were pleasantly surprised at just how
> widespread support is for some magic macro which expands to the
> mangled form of the enclosing function. Mangling schemes have also
> basically reduced to just two kinds in recent compilers, with the
> Microsoft mangling scheme considerably the harder to parse. Mangling
> schemes are also very stable over time. That makes this proposal
> tractable.

We had a similar discussion already. IMO, the library in its core should not 
rely on compiler specific features and should be implementable in pure C++ and 
standard APIs. This ensures its portability. It doesn't matter how many 
compilers implement the extension because there will always be the one that 
doesn't.

In any case, I don't think that mangled names are useful for other reasons I 
mentioned.