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This is a future I want to see – an ABI where types are preserved:

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· Jul 23, 2020

Fifth: The ABI should include the ability to encode information about types and layouts, not just function names. This should be used at compile/runtime to provide type information. Compilers should be able to import ABI libraries directly, or provide codegen tools to get headers

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Andy Kitchen

@auastro

Jul 24, 2020

The quoted proposal seems a lot like a reinvention of RPC. However most RPC systems today have fairly weak ad-hoc type systems.

Brendan Zabarauskas

@brendanzab

Jul 24, 2020

Yeah, it's pretty similar. I'm guessing this would match a wishlist of a nice RPC thing pretty closely. It's also definitely not a new idea - see some of the things I linked here:

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Brendan Zabarauskas

@brendanzab

· Jul 24, 2020

Replying to @bitshiftmask

Regarding typed ABIs, have you seen the work on type preserving compilation and linking types? Would be cool to look into this stuff: eg. not sure how up to date this is, but there's interesting stuff here: silc.ccs.neu.edu/projects/ (@aatxe linked me to this ages ago).

Brendan Zabarauskas

@brendanzab

Jul 24, 2020

Mesa also preserved types until link time I think? I'm not sure if it was present in the ABI though, and I doubt it would have everything on the wishlist, like the versioning stuff (I'm no expert on that history though).

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and

But yeah, I don't think it's entirely fair to say that it's a reinvention - and even if it was I'm fine with that! So long as I get it in my compilers and languages! Trying to shoe-horn every FFI thing into the C ABI is really frustrating! 😆

4:11 AM · Jul 24, 2020Twitter Web App

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Well put another way a synchronous zero-copy shared-memory RPC is effectively also a kind of ABI. The focus on ABI is a bit confusing to me though, couldn't you use the system ABI with added entry point metadata?

Andy Kitchen

@auastro

Jul 24, 2020

Shipping libraries with extra files that contain type and version metadata makes sense, you just need your format to catch on. GObject introspection is pretty well established

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