Re: [boost] Making Boost invisible

Subject: Re: [boost] Making Boost invisible
From: Edward Diener (eldiener_at_[hidden])
Date: 2018-09-25 17:38:03

On 9/25/2018 1:08 PM, John Maddock via Boost wrote:
> Folks I have a bug report against Boost.Config that I don't know what 
> (if anything) I should do about: 
> https://github.com/boostorg/config/issues/243
> 
> The issue is this: lets say I build boost as static libraries with 
> -fvisibilty=hidden because I want my application or shared library to 
> *hide all boost symbols*.  But there are some parts of boost which 
> unconditionally make things visible - throw_exception is one particular 
> culprit, but there are others, probably anything which uses 
> BOOST_SYMBOL_VISIBLE in fact.
> 
> Question: should we support this?  If so how?  The only thing I can 
> think of is a user-defined macro which when set, disables symbol 
> visibility.
> 
> Thoughts?

Isn't it up to each built library to determine what symbols should be 
visible or not in order to use that library ? In general public and 
protected class functionality should be visible, and functions which are 
part of the library's public interface are visible, with everything else 
remaining hidden. If an end-user wants to override this for some 
personal reason there should be a mechanism for doing so, but I would 
normally see little reason why an end-user should want to do that. What 
harm can it be to allow normally visible symbols to remain visible for 
the end-user ?

> 
> Thanks, John.