[cfe-users] Clang (with Visual Studio) wrongly complains about missing variables

[Jeffrey Walton via cfe-users]

On Thu, Sep 23, 2021 at 12:48 PM David Blaikie via cfe-users
<cfe-users at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
>
> On Thu, Sep 23, 2021 at 3:34 AM John Emmas via cfe-users <cfe-users at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
>> ...
>> Over on llvm-dev I'm trying to persuade them that declaring something as
>> __declspec(dllimport) should automatically exclude it from being
>> inlined.  And to be honest, I'd be quite surprised if that's not what
>> Microsoft intended.
>
> I think if it's clearly demonstrated that that's Microsoft's implementation - that no matter how hard you ask it to optimize and how simple the function is, that it won't inline a dllexported function that's inline in a header (both implicitly inline in a class definition, and probably check the case of a standalone dllexported inline non-member function in a header) that I'd say (though I have little sway/weight in this design decision) clang-cl should implement the same behavior, because it is observable/can be relied upon as you have (though also - dllexported variables should be defined somewhere, generally) & an opt-in flag to what is the current behavior (dllexport-inlining).

I think this is the old binary compatibility problem, like exceptions
crossing module boundaries. I think part of the problem is, Microsoft
does not publish a specification. For years Borland had to figure it
out by reverse engineering what MS was doing.

I guess the situation has not gotten any better.

Jeff