Re: [boost] "peer reviewed" - Rights and responsibilities of maintainers

Subject: Re: [boost] "peer reviewed" - Rights and responsibilities of maintainers
From: Robert Ramey (ramey_at_[hidden])
Date: 2018-10-18 15:17:02

On 10/18/18 4:12 AM, John Maddock via Boost wrote:
> I was about to agree with you, but there is one very important use case 
> - that of the application pluggin.  In that situation one would expect 
> that as long as everything is built with -fvisibility-hidden so that 
> each shared library is entirely self contained, then everything should 
> really be fine.

Hmm - I'm not sure about this.   Consider the C++ runtime library on 
windows with msvc.  The app specifies dynamic linking of some boost 
library.  I believe that will of necessity use the dynamically linked 
version of the C++ runtime library.  Now we call a plugin which includes 
another boost library - statically linked this time.  The plugin will 
use the statically linked version of the C++ runtime library.  Now as 
the program executes, it might be calling different versions of the 
C++standard library and who knows what else.  Sooooo - I would be pretty 
reluctant to start down this path.  Perhaps this is why microsoft, in 
it's wisdom, has separate "visibility" attributes for import / export.

In any case, this is one aspect that should really be solved at the 
committee level - but they're occupied with more pressing issues such as 
the spaceship operator.

Robert Ramey