Comment by Maxatar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Maxatar | Hacker News Reader

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This is the one major stumbling block for profiles right now that people are trying to fix.

C++ code involves numerous templates, and the definition of those templates is almost always in a header file that gets included into a translation unit. If a safety profile is enabled in one translation unit that includes a template, but is omitted from another translation unit that includes that same template... well what exactly gets compiled?

The rule in C++ is that it's okay to have multiple definitions of a declaration if each definition is identical. But if safety profiles exist, this can result in two identical definitions having different semantics.

There is currently no resolution to this issue.

I guess modules are supposed to be the magic solution for that, Bjarne has shown them in this article, even using import std.

Its a bit optimistic cause modules are still not really a viable option in my eyes, because you need proper support from the build systems, and notably cmake only has limited support for them right now.

Modules alone do not guarantee one definition per entity per linked program. On the contrary, build systems are needing to add design complexity to support, for instance, multiple built module interfaces for the std module because different translation units are consuming the std module with different settings -- different standards versions for instance.

I've been playing with building out an OpenGL app using C++23 on bleeding edge CMake and Clang and it really is a breath of fresh air... I do run into bugs in both but it is really nice. Most of the bugs are related to import std though which is expected... Oh and clangd(LSP) still having very spotty support for modules.

The tooling is way better than it was 6 months ago though asin I can actually compile code in a non Visual Studio project using import std.

I will be extremely happy the day I no longer need to see a preprocessor directive outside of library code.

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