[geos-devel] ABI protection

[strk at refractions.net]

Guys, I need C++ gury help here...

We have a big performance improving patch hanging.
This would require adding a new public method to
the Node class.

Now. It sounds to me that this would break ABI, am
I correct in thinking this ?

Someone suggested that adding the method as *last*
item in class definition could avoid this brekage,
setting the new method pointer as last in the vtable,
can we take this as good ?

The problem is that this is probably compiler-specific
so I dunno what to do.

PostGIS itself won't suffer from this as it never
directly uses Nodes, but I think other libs might
(ogr most likely).

If we cannot find a safe way to add a public function
I can still find a workaround using module-static 
methods for that, but I'd prefer avoiding it to
keep geos code layout similar between branches.

Comments, tips ?

--strk;