Are there any downsides to passing structs by value in C, rather than passing a pointer? If the struct is large, the there is obviously the performancd aspect of copying lots of data, but for a smaller struct, it should basically be the same as passing several values to a function. It is maybe even more interesting when used as return ...
I can understand this requirement for the old PPC RISC systems and even for x86-64, but for the old tried-and-true x86? In this case, the stack needs to be aligned on 4 byte boundaries only. Yes, some of the MMX/SSE instructions require 16byte alignments, but if that is a requirement of the callee, then it should ensure the alignments ar...
After a linux kernel upgrade, my VMWare server cannot start until using vmware-config.pl to do some re-config work (including build some kernel modules). If I update my windows VMWare host with latest Windows Service Pack, I usually not need to do anything to run VMWare. Why VMWare works differently between Linux and Windows? Does this...
I'm working on certain C++ library (or more framework). I want to make it backward compatible with previous versions preserving not only API compatibility but also ABI (like the great job Qt does). I use lots of functionality of Boost and it seems for me that this makes backward compatibility just impossible, unless I force user to have...
Hi, What is the best way to design a C API for dlls which deals with the problem of passing "objects" which are C runtime dependent (FILE*, pointer returned by malloc, etc...). For example, if two dlls are linked with a different version of the runtime, my understanding is that you cannot pass a FILE* from one dll to the other safely. ...
I have a DLL which needs to access data stored in STL containers in the host application. Because C++ has no standard ABI, and I want to support different compilers, the interface between the application and DLL basically has to remain plain-old-data. For vectors this is relatively straightforward. You can simply return the memory blo...
All the standard shared libraries on my Linux system (Fedora 9) specify ELFOSABI_NONE (0) as their OSABI. This is fine - however I've received a shared library from a supplier where the OSABI given in the ELF header is ELFOSABI_LINUX (3). This doesn't sound like an unreasonable value for a shared library intended for a Linux system, ho...
The title says everything. I am talking about C/C++ specifically, because both consider this as "implementation issue". I think, defining a standard interface can ease building a module system on top of it, and many other good things. What could C/C++ "lose" if they defined a standard ABI? ...
Hi, everyone: As the title described, how to use c library function fgets in assembly language? Indeed, I want to know how to get the file pointer to stdin. Thanks for your reply. ...
As far as I've understood, it is not possible to link libraries that use different versions of GCC's Application Binary Interface (ABI). Are there ABI changes to every version of GCC? Is it possible to link a library built with 4.3.1 if I use, say, GCC 4.3.2? Is there a matrix of some sort that lists all the ways I can combine GCC versio...
We have a struct in revision 1 of a shared library that we need to maintain the ABI for: struct Person { std::string first_name; std::string last_name; } In the revision 2, we're changing Person to this: class Person { public: Person(const std::string &f, const std::string &l); std::string first_name; std::string...
Hi, I am getting confuse with all those terms: ABI, calling convention, and hardware architecture. The ABI is link with the architecture: x86-64 have a different ABI than the i386. But then you can also define your own calling convention cdecl... Well so what is the link between all those concept? Which one is defining the other one...