GCC 4.7, STL and binary compatibility of objects built with different language standards

Chris Coulson chrisccoulson at ubuntu.com
Fri Jun 8 15:10:38 UTC 2012


Hi,

I've just finished debugging a Unity crash which occurs when we try a
test rebuild of Unity and Nux with GCC4.7 in quantal. Although the
original issue was caused by mixing 2 C++ ABI's (because libsigc hasn't
been rebuilt yet in quantal), it was no better even after rebuilding
libsigc with the quantal toolchain.

What is happening is, in GCC4.7, std::_List_base::_List_impl has a data
member which only exists for compilation units that are built with
-std=c++0x (_M_size). This means that the STL ABI is dependent on the
language standard. This obviously causes issues when a process loads
libraries that are built with different language standards and which
pass std::list's across public API's

In the Unity case, both Unity and Nux are built with -std=c++0x, but
they use libsigc which is not built with it and which exposes STL
objects in its public API. Rebuilding libsigc locally with -std=c++0x is
sufficient to make Unity work properly. However, uploading this will
probably break anything else in the archive using libsigc which isn't
built with -std=c++0x, so I'm not sure of the best way to proceed.

In addition to welcoming other people's opinions, I also want to make
sure that other people are careful here don't fall in to the same trap :)

Regards
Chris



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