On Thursday, 20 April 2023 07:32:39 PDT David Brown via Std-Proposals wrote:
> C++ already has a solution to this - namespaces. A well-designed C++
> library would have the global "status" variable inside a namespace.
> Indeed, it is likely to be in nested namespaces - something like
> "libspellcheck::internals::status". That will not conflict with any
> other "status" variable in other namespaces.

That's not a good solution for everything. It prevents symbol clashes, but it
doesn't inform the linker whether the symbol should be added to the symbol
table to be used by other libraries or not. Adding to the symbol table means
that table grows and, however good the hashing function used may be, you
increase the overhead of the linking. And given that on ELF systems, such
symbols are also interposable, that reference is actually doubly inefficient
because it needs to be indirect via the GOT.

However, I don't think solving this is the province of the standard. It's
entirely in the implementation's court.

-- 
Thiago Macieira - thiago (AT) macieira.info - thiago (AT) kde.org
   Software Architect - Intel DCAI Cloud Engineering