[mort96]

Like many things people claim "isn't a C++ problem but an implementation problem"... This is a C++ problem. Anything that's not nailed down by the standard should be expected to vary between implementations.

The fact that the standard doesn't specify a name mangling scheme leads to the completely predictable result that different implementations use different name mangling schemes.

The fact that the standard doesn't specify a mechanism to mangle and demangle names (be it at runtime or at compile time) leads to the completely predictable result that different implementations provide different mechanisms to mangle and demangle names, and that some implementations don't provide such a mechanism.

These issues could, and should, have been fixed in the only place they can be fixed -- the standard. ISO is the mechanism through which different implementation vendors collaborate and find common solutions to problems.

[josefx]

> The fact that the standard doesn't specify a name mangling scheme leads to the completely predictable result that different implementations use different name mangling schemes.

The ABI mess predates the standard by years and if we look that far back the Annotated C++ Reference Manual included a scheme in its description of the language. Many compiler writers back then made the intentional choice to ignore it. The modern day ISO standard would not fare any better at pushing that onto unwilling compiler writers than it fared with the c++03 export feature.

[mort96]

Well yeah, it can't be fixed now. It could have been specified near the beginning of the life of the language though, and the standard would've been the right place to do that.

I'm saying that the non-standard name mangling is a problem with C++. I'm not saying that it's an easily solvable problem.

[vlovich123]

> Anything that's not nailed down by the standard should be expected to vary between implementations.

When you have one implementations you have a standard. When you have two implementations and a standard you don’t actually have a standard in practice. You just have two implementations that kind of work similarly in most cases.

While the major compilers do a fantastic job they still frequently disagree about even “well defined” behavior because the standard was interpreted differently or different decisions were made.

[SideQuark]

> When you have two implementations and a standard you don’t actually have a standard in practice

This simply isn't true. Plenty of standardized things are interchangeable, from internet RFCs followed by zillions of players and implementations of various RFCs, medical device standards, encryption standards, weights and measures, currency codes, country codes, time zones, date and time formats, tons of file formats, compression standards, the ISO 9000 series, ASCII, testing standards, and on and on.

The poster above you is absolutely correct - if something is not in the standard, it can vary.

[vlovich123]

Lots of things have standards that are mostly interchangeable. But pretending like the implementations don't interpret standards differently and have important differences is naiive. This is doubly so for language implementations which frequently leave things as "implementation defined". Clang and GCC have intentionally made significant efforts to minimize their differences which is why it's less noticeable if you're just swapping between them (it didn't start out this way). MSVC has not made these efforts. Intel abandoned their compiler for Clang. So basically you already have MSVC & clang/GCC as dialects, ignoring more minor differences that readily exist between clang and GCC.

Compare this with languages like Zig, Rust, and Python that have 1 compiler and doesn't have any of the problems of C++ in terms of interop and not having dialects.

Java is the closest to C++ here but even there it's 1 reference implementation (OpenJDK that Oracle derives their release from) and a bunch of smaller implementations that everyone derives from. Java is aided here by the fact that the JDK code itself is shared between JVMs, the language itself is a very thin translation of code --> byte code, and the language is largely unchanging. JavaScript is also in a similar boat but they're aided by the same thing as Java - the language is super thin and has almost nothing in it with everything else deferred as browser APIs where there is this dialect problem despite the existence of standards.

[suprtx]

HN is a censorship haven and all, but I'd like to point out just one thing:

>Compare this with languages like Zig, Rust, and Python that have 1 compiler and doesn't have any of the problems of C++ in terms of interop and not having dialects.

For Python, this is straight up just wrong.

Major implementations: CPython, PyPy, Stackless Python, MicroPython, CircuitPython, IronPython, Jython.

[jdiff]

If you have an area where the standard is ambiguous about its requirements, then you have a bug in the standard. And hopefully you also have a report to send along to help it communicate itself more clearly.

[o11c]

This is like getting mad at ISO 8601 because it doesn't define the metric system.

No standard stands alone in its own universe; complementary standards must necessarily always exist.

Besides, even if the C++ standard suddenly did incorporate ABI standards by reference, Microsoft would just refuse to follow them, and nothing would actually be improved.

[no_wizard]

A better situation than today would be only having to deal with Microsoft and Not Microsoft, rather than multiple different ways of handling the problem that can differ unexpectedly