Skip to content

Comment on A Special Kind of Hell: intmax_t in C and C++ (2020)parent

Comments

Those shared libraries are a way to create plugins for commercial software.

That is an entirely reasonable use. And one that can have specific types and ABI guarantees for the commercial software and the plug-in. In addition, this would only be required if you were the developer of the commercial software or a plug-in. One example of this is COM which had specific types and memory allocation/deallocation.

However, the case where the C standard library is being dynamically linked, forces everyone to pay the price for ABI stability.

Except that the C standard library is compiler specific, only in the UNIX world it blends with the OS API, due to their symbiotic relationship.

AboutSource Built by g1lg1l

Hackerly is an independent reader for Hacker News, built on the public HN API. Not affiliated with Y Combinator.