Re: Limiting Exported Symbols on GCC On 4/12/07, Nicholas Clark  wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 12, 2007 at 01:50:09PM -0500, Joshua Isom wrote:
> >
> > On Apr 12, 2007, at 9:29 AM, Nicholas Clark wrote:
>
> > My view of this is something along these lines.  You can use any
> > function you want at all, but if it's not documented as part of the
> > supported API, there's nothing saying I won't purposely break your code
> > in the next release.  In big bold red letters of course.
> >
> > >Particularly given that on some platforms (such as Win32) API
> > >functions need
> > >to be exported explicitly, resulting in modules written on *nix
> > >platforms
> > >not working on Win32.
>
> The problem is that between now and that next release, someone inevitably
> writes something on Linux that doesn't work on Win32, and they blame everyone
> but themselves.
>
> I'd much prefer to nip the problem in the bud by preventing the code from
> ever being shipped.
>
i sit on nicholas's side of the fence. maybe i've been working on
windows too long, but this is the behavior i've come to expect. if a
function is not meant for public consumption, why is it available?
let's learn from the mistakes of previous designers and earlier
technologies.

when designing and implementing parrot's embedding/extending api, it'd
be nice if the linker failed on platforms other than windows. this
patch will accomplish that nicely.
~jerry

