RE: STL Containers and __declspec(export/import)

At 00:47 07.02.2005, you wrote:
>Your guess is correct.
>
>Exporting the STL containers is a Bad Thing(tm).
>
>Implementations of the STL are not necessarily binary compatible.  There is
>no convenient way to translate between different implementations, so if the
>DLL uses a different version than your executable, the objects will differ
>and your program will fail.

afaik this is a general problem of c++ (no general C++ ABI, see also 
http://aegisknight.org/cppinterface.html ), so in principle the same 
applies to normal c++ objects.

>Vectors are a special case.  The latest versions of the C++ standard have a
>guarantee that vectors are contiguous, and all major implementations before
>that guarantee also have that behavior, so passing vectors around as general
>arrays can be done safely.
>
>I seem to remember also that the VC++ 7.1 uses local storage in the
>implementation, so in that case, even moving between the same implementation
>would fail if you crossed EXE/DLL boundaries.

Not if you link all your modules to the DLL runtime, again all with the 
same version.

I use lots of stl and boost with my DLLs. As long as you make sure that all 
components are compiled with same compiler (+ same version) and linked with 
the runtime DLL it works without any problems. Otherwise it really gets 
involved: only C functions and pure abstract C++ types allowed and 
seperated memory managment between modules.

Vasco  



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