Betrayed by a bitfield [LWN.net]

Betrayed by a bitfield

Posted Feb 7, 2012 8:43 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: Betrayed by a bitfield by daglwn
Parent article: Betrayed by a bitfield

Since C11 includes _Alignas and you can specify you own alignment it's not a disaster, albeit it is inconvenience.

Perfectly working C++ program can already be broken by recompilation in C++11 mode, so it's not the first time upgrade broke things.

Of course is only possible if original program violated specs and worked by accident (if you can show me genuinely different behavior in standards-compliant program it'll be interesting to know, too, but so far all examples I've seen contained subtle violations of one form or another).

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Betrayed by a bitfield

Posted Feb 7, 2012 18:35 UTC (Tue) by daglwn (subscriber, #65432) [Link]

Ah, cool, didn't know about _Alignas. I'm a codegen guy so I'm not playing around in the C frontend very often. I only look at the standard when I really have to. :)

There's still an ABI problem if the compiler always has to align members to uphold the requirement.

> Perfectly working C++ program can already be broken by recompilation in
> C++11 mode

But as we all know, C++ is not C. :) I don't see this as a problem.

Betrayed by a bitfield

Posted Feb 7, 2012 20:53 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

> Perfectly working C++ program can already be broken by recompilation in
> C++11 mode

But as we all know, C++ is not C. :) I don't see this as a problem.

C++ is quite explicitly not C, but C++11 pretends that it's still C++.

Betrayed by a bitfield

Posted Feb 7, 2012 23:29 UTC (Tue) by daglwn (subscriber, #65432) [Link]

Ah, I read "C11."

Yes, you are correct, but I don't think there's an ABI issue. An ABI issue is much harder to deal with than a semantic change.

With an ABI issue you've got to recompile the world (your project, libraries it links to, etc.) to get a working application. With a semantic change you only recompile the bits that had to recoded to account for the change.

Betrayed by a bitfield

Posted Feb 8, 2012 8:54 UTC (Wed) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

YMMV, as usual.

We recompile the world anyway, so ABI change is less of a problem, but the fact that just a recompilation does not fix the issue and you need to do a lot of investigations is a problem.