Fail to build wich cxxstd=20 on Clang

[sdebionne]

We are having trouble building Boost.Locale for Conda forge (see https://github.com/conda-forge/boost-feedstock/pull/194) with cxxstd=20 which is required for the Cobalt library, on osx (clang 16).

I am not familiar with Locale, is there any macro that we should set to prevent the following issue:

Undefined symbols for architecture x86_64:
  "typeinfo for char8_t", referenced from:
      std::__1::basic_string<char8_t, std::__1::char_traits<char8_t>, std::__1::allocator<char8_t> > boost::locale::ios_info::string_set::get<char8_t>() const in formatter.o
ld: symbol(s) not found for architecture x86_64
clang-16: error: linker command failed with exit code 1 (use -v to see invocation)

[Flamefire]

That is a known issue with Clang. Which version of clang and Boost are you using? In Boost 1.84 a workaround is implemented: https://github.com/boostorg/locale/blob/de51c1a14244a8941f88e4ee9c2b6a742b362b90/include/boost/locale/config.hpp#L93

In Clang 15 this should be fixed.

[sdebionne]

Thanks for the quick answer. We build Boost1.84 with Clang 16 on MacOs 10.9. I am not sure if the clang version on MacOs matches the LLVM's once though.

[Flamefire]

They should match the LLVM 15.x version for a while already. So I'm not sure how to fix this from Boosts side. I'd say it should be fine to define BOOST_LOCALE_NO_CXX20_STRING8 on your side for this. If you have any information when/where this issue is fixed on MacOS and how to improve the condition to detect that I'd be grateful. Otherwise I'll just disable u8string support for MacOS completely.

[h-vetinari]

We're on clang 16 in conda-forge (though we could use clang 17 and soon 18 if we want; however libcxx is stuck at 16 pending some infrastructure work). The macOS deployment target in the PR mentioned by @sdebionne was already bumped to 10.13, and if there's a hard requirement to go higher, we can do that.

W.r.t. https://github.com/boostorg/locale/blob/de51c1a14244a8941f88e4ee9c2b6a742b362b90/include/boost/locale/config.hpp#L93

I don't see how that issue is still relevant; it was fixed as of LLVM 15, and we're past that.

[h-vetinari]

I am not sure if the clang version on MacOs matches the LLVM's once though.

There's only the clang we provide ourselves, we never use the system(==image) compilers in conda-forge.

[Flamefire]

I don't see how that issue is still relevant; it was fixed as of LLVM 15, and we're past that.

Looks I misinterpreted the error message which also started with "Undefined symbols" and seemingly related to std::basic_string<char8_t> and I missed the important part in all those templates: "typeinfo for char8_t" is what is missing.

And indeed I've seen that before popping up with libc++ on FreeBSD. I fixed that for the upcoming release. You can use that or apply https://github.com/boostorg/locale/commit/c5e8f02c903696a213fc4b710f6740ccd1f07f4e as a patch.