Binary Compatibility for Library Developers

Session information has not yet been published for this event.

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50 Minute Talk
Scheduled: Wednesday, September 18, 2013 from 11:50am – 12:40pm in Celestin A

One Line Summary

This presentation will talk about those real-world problems and their solutions, heavily drawing upon the solutions used by both Qt and KDE. It will mostly focus on issues facing libraries on Linux, but will give hints also for cross-platform portability.

Abstract

The C and C++ standards define what constitutes a well-formed program. However, they steer clear of any issues related to ABI, binary compatibility, and even modern dynamic loading of libraries. Yet developers for libraries are often faced with understanding and dealing with those issues that are out-of-scope for the standards. Far from an impossible task, there are simple guidelines, checklists, tooling, and processes that can be relied upon to guarantee binary compatibility between releases. Using them, it is possible to maintain large libraries compatible with previous versions for a long time, across multiple releases.

Speaker

  • Thiago Macieira

    Intel Corp.

    Biography

    Thiago Macieira holds a double degree in Engineering and an MBA. He has been involved in several Open Source projects for over 15 years and is an experienced C++ developer, having spent the better part of the last 10 years developing Qt and Qt-based software. He was also behind the creation of the Qt Project, an open source project around the Qt codebase. He works for Intel’s Open Source Technology Center (OTC) and he collects too many air miles going to conferences speaking about Qt, C++ and Open Source.