On Sun, 8 Jun 2025 at 11:45, Avi Kivity <avi_at_[hidden]> wrote:
> Sure, but it was painful. Very painful. It's not quite that painful
> for std::optional, because it's not used elsewhere in the library
> internals.
> But still, it's painful.
>
>
>
> It wasn't painful for me - I barely noticed it. Of course, everyone's mileage varies.
>
> In my opinion, in these days of containers, it's much easier to support multiple ABIs.

I don't think everybody uses containers.


> I don't think the Standard should concern itself with ABIs. It should promote source compatibility. It should be up to the vendors to decide whether to race ahead or be conservative.

I think the standard should concern itself with how the things
specified in it can be deployed.

> Distribution vendors already rebuild all their packages for each major release, and third-party vendors already build for multiple architectures. Having them build for the most recent and next-recent ABI is annoying, but not more than that.

You're talking about doubling the amount of ABIs a vendor needs to
target. That's a non-trivial exercise.