Niall Douglas wrote:
But for developers needing to test just compiled binaries in various combinations and configurations, name mangling is an unalloyed win. As I mentioned, I only just shot myself in the foot with this last week because I wasn't mangling the true compiler compiling the binaries into the library names on Windows.
FWIW, I was just looking into an issue with an exe compiled with -std=c++11 linking to Boost.System compiled with -std=c++03. Since the class layout of boost::system::error_category was different depending on whether <system_error> was available, this lead to interesting times and baffling stack traces. Of course we don't actually have a b2 feature for -std, so its directory encoding didn't help in this case. (And we don't encode this in the library names either, but that can't be done until we have a feature.) (Into the course of investigating this, I learned that libstdc++ performs quite a bit of heroics to prevent C++11 std::string and C++03 std::string to get mixed up in a similar way, or, if that's not possible, to make it work. So this is not just a Windows issue. It's just that a lot of work is done behind the scenes to keep things from breaking. Kind of like Boost.)