Re: Linux vs. libio

[Ulrich Drepper <drepper at cygnus dot com>]

Mark Mitchell <mark@codesourcery.com> writes:

> Fortunately, the changes are relatively minimal: almost no code --
> just a few changes in structure definitions and in a few macros.

This is not the point.  As Geoff pointed out the situation on Linux at
least is therefore wrt C++ I/O pretty good because of the tight
integration of the C and C++ functions.  Besides this is much more
light-weight and in future (after the merge with my development
version) it'll allow full wide-char and locale integration, something
which cannot 100% be achieved on other platforms.  This is not
possible if you now simply change the API and actually generate libio
code in libstdc++ which does not use the code in the libc.

Adding these changes will probably be ok for other platforms (since
there is no backward compatibility to be maintained) and it is also ok
*for test purposes* to use this changed code on Linux, but no
production release should be made with these changes and people should
be discouraged to distribute libstdc++ versions compiled in this way.
libstc++ is for various reasons generated most often as a shared
object and therefore it is really A Bad Thing(tm) to change the API in
an incompatible way just to change it again a bit later.

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