Fragile binary interface problem
part 2/8 · 11.2 KB total
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Cause
The problem occurs due to a "shortcut" used with compilers for many common object-oriented (OO) languages, a design feature that was kept when OO languages were evolving from earlier non-OO structured programming languages such as C and Pascal.
In these languages there were no objects in the modern sense, but there was a similar construct known as a record (or "struct" in C) that held a variety of related information in one piece of memory. The parts within a particular record were accessed by keeping track of the starting location of the record, and knowing the offset from that starting point to the part in question. For instance a "person" record might have a first name, last name and middle initial, to access the initial the programmer writes thisPerson.middleInitial which the compiler turns into something like a = location(thisPerson) + offset(middleInitial). Modern CPUs typically include instructions for this common sort of access.
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