COM compatibility

[thomson at ca.ibm.com]

I won't be in the call today and Mark will be a little late,
so I will make my point this morning via email.

A while ago Jason was worried about COM compatibility.
Part of that is to ensure that vtables can be expressed in C.
But the resolution of issue B-4 says that a vtable contains
function descriptors rather than function descriptor pointers.

>From the standpoint of call performance that is a good thing,
but the result can't be built in C.  I know that we at least
will also have to rewrite parts of our C++ runtime that hand-build vtables.
Neither of these are critical for IBM but may be for others.


Brian Thomson
VisualAge C/C++ Chief Architect