Re: web/10254: Explain binary compatibility to other vendors' compilers

[Janis Johnson <janis187@us.ibm.com>]

The following reply was made to PR web/10254; it has been noted by GNATS.

From: Janis Johnson <janis187@us.ibm.com>
To: schnetter@uni-tuebingen.de
Cc: gcc-gnats@gcc.gnu.org
Subject: Re: web/10254: Explain binary compatibility to other vendors' compilers
Date: Fri, 28 Mar 2003 14:38:13 -0800

 Information about binary compatibility between GCC and other
 compilers would be useful, but a page keeping track of such
 information could get messy very quickly.  The information
 itself could become outdated when new versions of compilers
 are released, and links like this are difficult to keep up
 to date.
 
 There's another problem with providing links to information
 about other compilers.  I looked up a particular compiler to
 see if it had a statement about binary compatibility with
 GCC; it does, but it follows a claim about how easy it is to
 port code from using GCC to using that proprietary compiler.
 Links to that kind of information aren't appropriate for the
 GCC site.
 
 It would be appropriate, though, for us to describe known
 incompatibilities or ABI corner cases, along with examples
 that demonstrate how real code is affected.  I've been
 planning to add more of such examples as test cases in
 testsuite/g++.dg/compat/abi (feel free to nag me about
 that).  Those tests (once they exist!) could be mentioned
 in the Binary Compatibility section of the GCC Manual.
 
 Erik, does that sound reasonable?
 
 Janis Johnson
 janis187@us.ibm.com