[cfe-dev] COM ABI support?

[Stephen Lin]

> I realize that you are saying this tongue-in-cheek, but anyways...
>
> MSVC++, Borland C++, Watcom C++... all they existed much before the
> Itanium existed. When the Itanium C++ ABI came into existence, they
> (specially MSVC++) had no incentives for switching to it. In the closed
> source world changing the C++ ABI is a big issue. And using an ABI hard
> to duplicate (i.e. undocumented) has its advantages from the competitive
> POV.
>

Well, independent of motives, relying on a subset of the C++ ABI (and
forcing others on your platform to do the same, by not making the full
C++ ABI documented) has some technical advantages, arguably: it means
that ABI compatibility between C++ and other languages can be achieved
(jn a subset of cases) without forcing the implementations of other
languages to understand something as esoteric as C++ name mangling.

Stephen