[cfe-dev] May libc++ support symbol versioning?

[David Chisnall via cfe-dev]

Hi,

I would be interested to know who is making that statement on behalf of 
the FreeBSD project.  We made a conscious decision *not* to use symbol 
versioning for the FreeBSD build of libc++ when we imported it.

Symbol versioning allows you to provide versions for exported symbols. 
This is a good solution for maintaining backwards compatibility in C 
libraries, where the only things exported from a library are functions 
(or, occasionally, globals) and it is often possible to provide 
backwards-compatibility versions of functions.  For example, FreeBSD 
libc provides some compat versions of stat for callers that will provide 
a smaller statbuf structure than the newer version of the API expects to 
fill.

In contrast, C++ libraries export complex types and expect to inline a 
large number of the operations on them.  The boundary of a C++ library 
is much more fuzzy.  Types declared in libc++ headers become part of the 
name mangling for any functions that take them as arguments.  Symbol 
versioning does not help with that at all.

Libc++ does provide a mechanism for incrementally changing the ABI.  All 
of the standard types are declared in the std::__v1 namespace.  We could 
provide the new versions in the std::__v2 namespace and conditionally 
import either version into the std namespace depending on the 
compilation options.  That would allow code linked against libc++ today 
to continue to use the old versions, but allow new code to adopt the new 
versions, with the caveat that it would change name mangling of any 
function that took a standard library type as arguments, so you would 
not be able to mix a library built with old libc++ with one built 
against new libc++.

This solution is not actually much better than FreeBSD bumping the 
SONAME and relegating the old libc++ to a COMPAT version.  I was under 
the impression that this was the plan for FreeBSD 12, but apparently it 
didn't happen.  It is something that should definitely be done for 
FreeBSD 13.

David

On 25/02/2020 06:30, Zhihao Yuan via cfe-dev wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I got message from FreeBSD about whether
> they can upgrade to V2 ABI.  To summarize
> the discussion:
> 
>    FreeBSD is not willing to land an ABI
>    break unless it is for the purpose of
>    introducing symbol version because
>    breaking libc++ ABI means breaking
>    ABI in three actively supported
>    FreeBSD versions.  There is no such
>    thing called "break in the next release."
> 
> May libc++ support symbol versioning
> in V2 or a specific variant of ABI?
> 
> --
> Zhihao Yuan, ID lichray
> The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
> _______________________________________________
> 
> 
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