Re: [Boost-users] Signals2 benchmark

Subject: Re: [Boost-users] Signals2 benchmark
From: Niall Douglas (s_sourceforge_at_[hidden])
Date: 2015-02-10 21:51:55

On 10 Feb 2015 at 17:22, Gottlob Frege wrote:

> Parts of Boost have these ODR issues if you are not careful.  Other
> parts don't.  So you need to "do it right" when designing/implementing
> the API.

GCC 5.0 is going to start optimising on the basis of ODR, as in code 
which breaks ODR gets optimised in undefined behaviour ways. Thinking 
about my own code where I routinely have violated ODR in source files 
for convenience under the assumption that source files have limited 
interactions with other source files, this could turn into a real 
nest of vipers akin to aliasing bugs.

Indeed only last night I violated ODR! FreeBSD's sysctl headers which 
represent the kernel API most unfortunately define a struct thread. 
This definition causes ambiguity with std::thread and boost::thread, 
so to work around it I wrapped the BSD sysctl headers with:

#define thread freebsd_thread
#include <sys/types.h>
#include <sys/sysctl.h>
#include <sys/user.h>
#undef thread

Probably safe, but still an ODR violation :(. That's how easily 
riddled with ODR a large mature C++ code base can become.

> It sounds like Nigel has convinced Nevin that for a hypothetical
> thread-safe + non-thread-safe "Signals3", we could/would do it the
> right way.

Nigel? Did we or did we not work together in the same office and team 
for ten and a half months??? :)

Niall

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