Thoughts? Would anybody be interested in something like this?
No, IMO unless this is obvious and easy to use then no-one will use it. My point is we need more simplicity, not more complexity.
And another thing... ;-) Can someone please explain what's wrong with changing BOOST_SYMBOL_IMPORT to __attribute__((visibility("default"))) ? Surely the only things that GCC can re-export in that case is RTTI info and class vtables (it doesn't have access to member function definitions after all only declarations) - and that's exactly what we want to happen right? For sure we may re-export some symbols that end up not being used, but in principle a shared library cannot know in advance what it's clients will use / need anyway? Sorry if I'm being dense. Cheers, John.