RE: [ft-devel] FreeType compatibility with C++ managed extensions

[Graham Asher]

Dear FreeTypers,

I had some second thoughts about making FreeType run under C++ managed
extensions.

You have to compile everything as C++, not C. That causes compatibility
problems. To quote Microsoft
(http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms173265): "The C++ type-safety
rules are strict, so type conversions must be made explicit with casts. For
example, malloc returns a void pointer, but can be assigned to a pointer to
any type in C with a cast:" ... and "Identifiers used in C code that happen
to be keywords in C++ (such as virtual, new, delete, bool, true, false,
etc.) must be renamed. This can generally be done with simple
search-and-replace operations.".

This alone makes my original idea impractical :-(

So my original impression that all I had to do was change identifiers in
header files #included by C++ was incorrect.

Therefore I withdraw my proposal. (It may still be possible to use FreeType
in what Microsoft call a 'mixed assembly' - part managed C++ and part
unmanaged C/C++ - the unmanaged part would be FreeType - but the header
files would still cause a problem to any managed code that needed to call
FreeType functions.)

Best regards,

Graham Asher