On 12/2/2020 5:12 AM, Andrey Semashev via Boost wrote:
On 12/2/20 1:21 AM, Edward Diener via Boost wrote:
I believe the great majority of Boost libraries attempt to maintain ABI compatibility between releases.
My impression is the opposite. Boost has never declared backward ABI or API compatibility. There's a reason why binary distributions of Boost append a version tag that matches Boost version to packages and binaries.
Whether Boost declares it or not I do not think Boost libraries change the API or ABI very often between releases and, if they do, they will notify the end-user about it. But of course you are correct that their is no attempt at a policy that claims compatibility between releases.
But just like with compilers it is not always possible between releases.
You have to give credit to libstdc++ developers at the very least. It maintains backward ABI compatibility across all C++ standard versions and across libstdc++ releases for many years. I think, libc++ also does the same, although I'm not following its development.
So are you telling me that if I have gcc-10.2 I should be able to use the gcc-5.1 libstdc without any ABI problems ?