I suspect the right way to handle changing ABI is to do it the way it’s always been done – by bumping the soname.

Having recently done some work on a C++ project, I’ve discovered an issue present in the dual ABI implementation. What seemed like trivial code to handle an exception from attempting to open a non-existent file just wasn’t working. I worked it down to the following test case:

#include <fstream>
#include <iostream>
#include <typeinfo>

int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
    using namespace std;
    using std::ios;
    
    ifstream a_file;
    a_file.exceptions(ios::badbit | ios::failbit);
    
    try {
        a_file.open("a-non-existent-file", ios::in);
    }
    catch (ios_base::failure &exc) {
        cout << "Caught exception on attempt to open non-existing file." << endl;
    }
    catch (exception &exc) {
        cout << "Caught standard exception: " << typeid(exc).name() << endl;
    }

    return 0;
}

Surprisingly, this fails to work properly (prints the wrong message) when compiled with a straight “g++ -o simple simple.cc”. It works correctly when compiled instead with “g++ -D_GLIBCXX_USE_CXX11_ABI=0 -o simple simple.cc”. I would have filed a bug, but it seems the problem is known.

This is a pretty major bug. Any C++ program that handles I/O errors by catching the appropriate exceptions just isn’t going to work. Furthermore, this isn’t just a minor problem; having to separate out implementations of iosbase and derived classes for the two ABIs would significantly reduce the benefit of even having the dual ABI. The problem with “clever” hacks like the dual ABI libstdc++ is that they are (1) often not so clever and are (2) always most definitely hacks. The proposed solution? Heap more hacks on top so the first hack works:

One option to make both forms work would be to hack the EH runtime to make handlers for std::ios_base::failure able to catch std::ios_base::failure[abi:cxx11] objects, and vice versa, creating an object of the other type on the fly.

Urgh. Just urgh.

What really annoys me most about this nonsense is that the one sane option I have – stripping out the ‘abi_tag’ nonsense from the source, re-compiling libstdc++ and calling it libstdc++.so.7 – would probably cause me problems further down the track, because third-party binaries are going to want the new ABI with the old soname (and even if I didn’t care about those, I’d still be one version number up from the official libstdc++ from that point on, which feels like it could cause problems).