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Cherry-pick portability fixes to 23.x line #12997

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merged 2 commits into from
Jun 7, 2023
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@fowles fowles commented Jun 7, 2023

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Romain-Geissler-1A and others added 2 commits June 7, 2023 12:57
…orms (protocolbuffers#12983)

Hi,

It seems that until last year, the logic behind `PROTOBUF_USE_DLLS` was for Windows (MSCV) only. It was changed to all platforms here in protocolbuffers@5a0887f

Last month, the generated pkg config files were updated to reflect the protobuf build-time value of `PROTOBUF_USE_DLLS` as it was indeed noted that it changes the ABI. This was done in protocolbuffers#12700 In the commit message it is mentionned that most likely we shall rather have a stable ABI.

Finally in protocolbuffers#12746 which at some point mentions https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/283987730#comment7 where a Google employee hits the linker issue:
```
undefined reference to `google::protobuf::internal::ThreadSafeArena::thread_cache_'
```
which denotes a mix of some .o or libs built `PROTOBUF_USE_DLLS` defined and some others build with `PROTOBUF_USE_DLLS` undefined, resulting in ABI incompatibilities.

I also hit this issue while trying to include protobuf in a corporate environment using it's own proprietary build system in which it is expected that .a and .so use a compatible ABI.

From my own understanding, ideally we should always use `thread_local` variables, but experience has shown that:
 - old iOS (iOS < 9) didn't seem to accept `thread_local`, leading to the `GOOGLE_PROTOBUF_NO_THREADLOCAL` macro later renamed `PROTOBUF_NO_THREADLOCAL` which allowed to disable this, but it is not set anywhere in the protobuf code base. Also I doubt you still want to support such old iOS now, so maybe you should consider removing all `PROTOBUF_NO_THREADLOCAL` related code paths (this pull request doesn't do this).
  - MSVC's DLL interface doesn't seem to accept exporting thread local variables (at least from what I understood, I know absolutely nothing about the Windows ecosystem), yet we can "hide" a thread local variable in a static function using a thread local variable. However in that case the access to TLS variable is not inlined, leading to worse performances, this hack shall be done only for Windows (actually when using MSVC) *AND* we build a shared library.
  - In all other cases, a classical `thread_local` shall be used, no matter if we build a static or a shared library. In particular on Linux which I guess is the target Google cares the more about for its own production. This pull request achieves this.

Am I right in my conclusion ?

Closes protocolbuffers#12983

COPYBARA_INTEGRATE_REVIEW=protocolbuffers#12983 from Romain-Geissler-1A:stable-abi-use-dll-non-windows dc23ff5
PiperOrigin-RevId: 538230923
@fowles fowles requested a review from mkruskal-google June 7, 2023 17:00
@fowles fowles marked this pull request as ready for review June 7, 2023 17:00
@fowles fowles requested a review from a team as a code owner June 7, 2023 17:00
@fowles fowles added the 🅰️ safe for tests Mark a commit as safe to run presubmits over label Jun 7, 2023
@github-actions github-actions bot removed the 🅰️ safe for tests Mark a commit as safe to run presubmits over label Jun 7, 2023
@fowles fowles merged commit 647052a into protocolbuffers:23.x Jun 7, 2023
@h-vetinari
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efa1ec7 is an ABI-change, which I'm a bit surprised to see in a patch-release... Is there an policy regarding what changes can / should / cannot be backported?

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fowles commented Jun 18, 2023

Yes, we do not provide any guarantees about ABI stability. https://protobuf.dev/support/cross-version-runtime-guarantee/#cpp

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5 participants