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by valleyer 1470 days ago
You are of course correct in a broad sense.

However, when the discussion already mentions "ABI contracts", they're probably referring specifically to the "fragile binary interface problem" (especially regarding member field access), which does not affect all languages that offer inheritance.

As the Wikipedia article mentions, this more specific problem is (confusingly) often referred to just as the "fragile base class problem".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fragile_binary_interface_probl...
1 comments
pjmlp 1470 days ago
It still affects all compiled languages that offer inheritance, and OOP ABIs like COM.
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valleyer 1468 days ago
Maybe I'm still misunderstanding you, but (modern) Objective-C is an example of a compiled language without the fragile base class ABI problem.

(It pays for this with extra indirection at runtime, of course: ivar accesses must first look up their runtime-resolved offset.)

link