Shared libraries

> Look on Vulkan as an example of stable ABI that have to be performant, too

Vulkan's ABI is stable and extensible and C-based (allowing FFI from many languages), with the tradeoff that it's painful and bug-prone to use directly.

That's only acceptable because most application developers won't use it directly. They'll use something like https://github.com/KhronosGroup/Vulkan-Hpp which provides an easier-to-use and safer C++ API, but gives no promises about API stability. That's a header-only library, so effectively it's statically linked into every application. (Header-only libraries are popular because C++'s ABI support is so poor that even static linking of separately-compiled libraries is unreliable). Or they'll use some other wrapper or engine, or write their own, with the same issues.

So now the problem is: how could you implement something like Vulkan-Hpp as a shared library with a stable ABI? And the current answer is, you can't. Vulkan isn't solving the problem of safe ABIs; it's just shifting it to another layer which doesn't solve it either.

If you want shared libraries and safety (which I think was the premise of this thread), it seems worth trying to come up with a better solution than that.

(Vulkan is also a peculiar example because it has a complex architecture where applications link (dynamically or sometimes statically) to a Vulkan Loader which dynamically links to multiple independent driver implementations, and drivers export the whole Vulkan ABI through a GetProcAddr interface, and applications call a trampoline function in the Loader that dispatches to the appropriate driver. (If you have multiple GPUs, the application might use multiple drivers at once). Applications can avoid the trampoline cost by using a GetProcAddr to get a function pointer directly into the driver, though it may actually be a function pointer into a separate Layer library that can intercept and modify each call before the driver sees it (for debugging etc). I wouldn't call that "no crazy hacks". (https://github.com/KhronosGroup/Vulkan-Loader/blob/main/d...))