[cxx-abi-dev] comparing type_infos (was Re: Patch forthrow/catchproblems)

[Jim Dehnert]

Mark Mitchell wrote:
> 
> --On Tuesday, August 14, 2001 10:36:31 PM -0500 Eli Boling
> <eboling at borland.com> wrote:
> 
> > I really prefer that not to focus on a solution that relies on the
> > performance of the dynamic loader to patch up pitfalls in the design of
> > the implementation. That works fine for the unix community, but not so
> > hot for the Windows community.  If I work on an ABI, I don't want to have
> > to redo big pieces of it on another platform because the loader isn't
> > tuned to deal with issues related to particular language implementations.
> 
> The tradeoff is that if you don't focus on the dynamic loader, then
> you have to focus on each programming language separately.  The ideal,
> of course, is to do both -- make each ABI as efficient as possible
> *and* make the loader as efficient as possible.
> 
> So, if we can do something to make the C++ ABI more efficient, we
> should definitely do that, by all means.

Let's keep in mind too that this ABI is definitely an ELF-based ABI, i.e.
the external representation (file format, symbols, etc.) aspects assume
an underlying ELF representation.  There's definitely benefit to choosing
internal representations/interfaces to fit a variety of contexts, but if
it's an optimization tradeoff between contexts, the mechanism that wins
should be the one that works well with ELF and its associated tools.

Jim

-- 
-	    Jim Dehnert		dehnert at transmeta.com
	    (408)919-6984	dehnertj at acm.org