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> People want to use new features in existing files Yes, and it would have been The Right Thing(TM) to ignore these people. > And they expect to link seamles

> People want to use new features in existing files Yes, and it would have been The Right Thing(TM) to ignore these people. > And they expect to link seamlessly the existing files against new files. As I said, that shouldn't have been a problem (and it would have been a good time to talk about C++'s ABI). It's possible with C from C++ and there are actually other languages using even other compilers or interpreters or VMs that can use C++. And ignoring the problems when calling a C++ library compiled by another C++ compiler on Windows.

spacechild1 3y ago
> Yes, and it would have been The Right Thing(TM) to ignore these people. No, it wouldn't because it would have seriously hindered C++11 adoption. I have personally worked on an open source C++ project that had been originally written in C++98, but switched to "modern C++" for certain features (most notably, <thread> and <atomic>). It would have been a major pain if we had to rewrite all of our source code to remove incompatibilities, just so that we could use these new features in a few places. I cannot even imagine what it would be like in a large commercial code base. > As I said, that shouldn't have been a problem (and it would have been a good time to talk about C++'s ABI). It's possible with C from C++ Well, you could link, but you wouldn't be able to (safely) share any non-POD objects between compilation units because of possible ABI mismatches. That's not particularly useful. The problem is much more complex than you apparently think.