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Comment by NonNefarious | Hacker News Reader

ABI shenanigans are what killed the whole "off-the-shelf components" promise of C++ and object orientation.

They really made the same mistake again?

I don't know how you arrived at that. C++ has the exact opposite ABI problems: it has a far-too-stable ABI that leaks thanks to poor abstractions (header files and template expansion in first-party code). Institutional C++ users have far too many implicit ABI dependencies to ever sign off on breakages, so C++ stdlib maintainers are unable to optimize much of the `std` namespace.

This in contrast to Rust, which actually does fulfill the "off-the-shelf" promise for most use cases. It's really refreshing to be able to do `cargo build` on nearly any host and get a single binary.

Edit: Jason Turner covers C++'s ABI woes excellently here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=By7b19YIv8Q

C++ has Schrödinger's ABI: some will say that it has a too stable ABI and others will say that its ABI is not stable at all. Which one is it ?

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/67839008/please-explain-...

Can one link two rust static libraries communicating with actual rust symbols (not just C ones), one built with gcc-rs (assuming that this is possible yet), the other built with rustc with its default x86_64-pc-windows-msvc abi ? if not, it's at the exact same state ABI-wise than C++

Well, it's a multiparadigm language, so both :-)

I'm being facetious, but it really is both: it's too unstable in ways that are bad, and also too stable in other ways that are bad.

Edit: since you updated your comment: Rust is not in the same position as C++. C++ has an unstable ABI that it cannot break; Rust has an unstable ABI that it can (and regularly does break). Rust works around this with developer tooling; C++ largely ignores the problem and requires developers to learn the secret rules through blood and tears.

> Rust works around this with developer tooling;

how does that work for companies that may use proprietary rust libraries? the proprietary lib authors won't recompile their shit for you just because you upgraded to the latest rustc

As pointed out, the C ABI is stable. If companies absolutely feel the need to distribute Rust shared libraries and cannot guarantee the compiler being used, then it's a reasonable choice. I suspect that isn't very common, however.

More realistically, the answer is to change the interface: Rust is pretty popular in software architectures where the unit of operation is a networked or IPC'd service; vendors can distribute binaries that communicate at that layer instead.

> vendors can distribute binaries that communicate at that layer instead.

they could do this in C++ also but they overwhelmingly don't, I don't see why they would in any other language for the same target applications

For one, because it's easier in Rust (this goes back to the developer experience and tooling again). But we've now gone from "here's how Rust and C++'s ABI guarantees differ" to "proprietary vendors might not have the easiest time in either language," which is a significant deviation.

The real answer is that Rust doesn’t really seek a solution for this problem. That’s fine, but C++ does and it pays an appropriate price for doing so. That’s just how things are.

I arrived at that through the entire C++/OO/pre-built-components hype of '90s and beyond, the failure of which was blamed on a non-codified ABI.

Rust wants to fix this, but it's an extremely hard problem and other tasks received higher priority.

See "How Swift Achieved Dynamic Linking Where Rust Couldn't" for details: https://faultlore.com/blah/swift-abi/

Thanks for that referral.

On a side note: I like Swift for the most part, but the last time I looked at upcoming language features they seemed like a kitchen-sink approach that's bloating the language and would better have been left to libraries. I've read this sentiment in more than one place, too.

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