Re: static vs. shared linking

[David Stacey <drstacey@tiscali.co.uk>]

On 09/04/15 22:32, Larry Hall (Cygwin) wrote:
> On 04/09/2015 04:15 AM, David Stacey wrote:
>
> <snip>
>
>> I can't believe that I'm the first person to fall foul of this - any 
>> library
>> that relies heavily on templates risks falling into the same trap.
>
> <snip>
>
> It's true that someone using STL strings has the potential to see this 
> bug
> but I doubt there are allot of template libraries out there pulling 
> the same
> memory trick or doing so with the same catastrophic results. 

It's going to affect all templates that have a static member variable, 
where an instantiation of said template is passed across a DLL boundary. 
Maybe there aren't too many of those.

> In addition,
> this is not the first time this has come up as an issue (for Cygwin or 
> other
> platforms) in one form or another.  Here's a good reference:
>
> <https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=16612>

Wow - that was an interesting read, thank you! Obviously a different 
context, but most definitely the same problem. It looks as though I 
stumbled into a bear trap that's been around for at least ten years.

> There they recommend the "--enable-fully-dynamic-string" flag as a 
> solution
> for this particular problem but I agree if the "-frepo" will solve 
> this as
> well, it's better because it manages templates better overall and aligns
> with Linux behavior.

I'm not sure I like '--enable-fully-dynamic-string', because it changes 
the API of std::string, and the two APIs are not interchangeable. So a 
library compiled with '--enable-fully-dynamic-string' can't be used with 
code that omitted that compiler option. You have to use it everywhere or 
not at all.

Poco is a network-centric library for other programmes to use. If I were 
to use '--enable-fully-dynamic-string' in compiling Poco then that would 
force users of the Poco library to use that compiler option too. And if, 
at the same time, they tried to link against another C++ API that wasn't 
built that way then the code wouldn't link - or if it did link it would 
crash when run.

So I either have to use '-frepo' or explicitly export the templates that 
Poco uses. '-frepo' might take longer to compile, and I suspect that it 
will force users of Poco to compile with '-frepo' as well. But it's 
guaranteed to catch other templates that I might have missed, and it 
will work with other C++ libraries that weren't built with 
'--enable-fully-dynamic-string'. So I'll stick with '-frepo'.

Anyway, thanks again for the link - interesting stuff.

Dave.


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