this post was submitted on 22 Mar 2024
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...so that leads to another annoyance of mine. The insistence that there aren't two languages but indeed one named C/C++. Obviously I'm being a bit sarcastic but people blur the lines HEAVILY and it drives me crazy. Most of the C code I've written is not compatible with C++...at least not without a lot of type casting at a bare minimum. Or a compiler flag to disable that. Never mind the other differences. And then there's the restrict keyword, and the ABI problems if the C library you're using doesn't extern C in the headers...etc etc... -_-
Yeah, I use that all the time. I think I use it in a different way though. I have projects with C, C++ and other languages. The C and C++ get compiled and linked together, and so there are some considerations for those files that don't apply to anything else. So I mean C files and C++ files, but not as if they were the same language.
Yeah that's completely fair and makes sense to me. I just know I've come across stuff where people are talking about it like they're the same language. This seems to be especially prevalent in windows development where the C support is pretty poor in comparison and tends to kinda be lumped into into C++.
Projects for Apple platforms usually also use .h, where it could mean anything from C/C++ to Objective-C/C++.
In practice, Clang handles mixed C/C++/Obj-C codebases pretty well and determining the language for a header never really felt like an issue since the API would usually already imply it (declaring a C++ class and/or Obj-C class would require the corresponding language to consume it).
If a C++ header is intended to be consumed from C, adding the usual
#ifdef __cplusplus extern "C" {...should alleviate the name mangling issues.Yeah, I was ignoring apple platforms because Objective-C doesn't even have its own header extension as an option. Also not all C headers do extern stuff...and it doesn't fix 100% of compatibility problems when you do that anyway. Also I'm not really talking about it from a compiler perspective, I'm talking about it from an organization and human perspective. I know compilers generally don't care...which is exactly how we ended up in this predicament.