Fedora 22 will ship with GCC 5, which brings a whole host of enhancements, among which is a new default C++ ABI. In this article, we’ll cover how that ABI transition will work in Fedora.Background – what’s an ABI, why is it changing, and what does this mean for developers?
Put simply, binary compatibility means applications that are compiled on a combination of an operating system and a particular hardware architecture will load and run similarly across different instances of the operating environment. Application binaries consist of executable files and Dynamic Shared Objects (DSOs – the formal name for shared libraries), and the level of compatibility is defined by a specific application binary interface (ABI).The development of new features in compilers, libraries and related tools – and notably any new language standard those tools support – can result in changes to the ABI, requiring that certain binaries need to be re-built, or that newly built binaries are not directly compatible with existing binaries
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