ipr VS ifc-spec

I'm not sure about clang or gcc. For VS, u/GabrielDosReis might be able to speak to the .ifc IPR stability/volatility. My wager (deferring to him to correct me) is that the IPR is still changing over time but will stabilize more over time.

Have you had a look at its uses in the IPR interface and implementation? https://github.com/GabrielDosReis/ipr/blob/main/include/ipr/interface

> C++ has virtually zero tooling

CMake, Meson, Waf, Conan, Visual Studio Code, Visual Studio, CLion, Intel VTune, GDB, LLDB, XCode, Artifactory, SonarQube, clang-tidy, clang-format, astyle, Incredibuild...

> Comparing CMake to cargo is like comparing fifth century fireworks to the Space Shuttle

You are wrong here. Cargo serves a set of fixed "this-is-how-to-do-it" thing. In C++ you can build anything. I do not mean it is better, but C++ software already exists and that is the solution that it works better for it. :)

> and the committee is not interested in ever working on that

https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2017/p08...

Interoperability effort for modules: https://github.com/GabrielDosReis/ipr

IPR Library

There is a proposal for this: https://github.com/microsoft/ifc-spec

Only Microsoft implants that so far. I gather EDG (which powers IntelliSense) has been at least researching support for consuming IFC files.

I'm not aware of anyone sponsoring work in Clang or GCC to add IFC support.

Note that like .lib files, you'll likely need to build and share different module binary module interface files (e.g. Visual Studio's .ifc) per architecture, since #ifdefs are resolved early. Otherwise (in theory), you could share the same BMI for different architectures since they are largely a symbol table/graph of the parsed code (higher level representation before optimizations).

My hope is that the IFC format can be evolved (with community inputs) into something supported (but not necessarily required) by C++ compilers. I regard something like the IFC as a necessity for the C++ community to realize the full potential of modules.

Now, Gabriel Dos Reis has a CppCon 2021 talk describing a way compilers could communicate in enough detail such that IntelliSense, static analysis, etc. would work as expected. The file format for this mechanism is called IFC and here is the link to the relevant repo. I don't have any information about it being implemented in any compiler other than Microsoft's, but it would solve a lot of problems if it were available.

For those interested in the final pdf, here is a link to the latest release containing said pdf