News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:The use of `class` for things that should be simple free ... by fnord123 on Thursday May 28, 2020 @06:43AM (#23335768)
> only things that change the layout. adding a non-virtual method does not break ABI at all for instance.

Yes, you are correct. The point was that C code can keep the ABI intact through (some) data layout changes but vanilla C++ classes cannot I misstated it.

>Good modern practice (c.f. Rust, etc) is to ship LTO'ed mostly-static binaries.

That is the state of play now because Rust does not have a stable ABI. I thought one might be coming but maybe no one's working on it. It's unfortunate because it would be really nice to have binary crates with signing.

>hopefully in a few years everyone will switch to snap / flatpack / appimage to finally reach a sane application distribution model on Linux.

Snap has a while to go before it can be adopted fully. Images are enormous, they take a long time to load, and they don't respect (or don't understand) hidpi settings. I tried to use it for spotify and telegram-desktop and other applications but they just don't work that well.

>it much harder to hack your way out of things when it's 3AM and everything is crashing and you have 5 minutes to fix things before heads start to roll.

Absolutely but it comes from enormous systems like Windows where changing a library and breaking ABI means recompiling Everything. And these compilation jobs are often 'overnights'.

There are no comments on this comment yet.