Working on a cross platform library

Question

What are the best practices on writing a cross platform library in C++?

My development environment is Eclipse CDT on Linux, but my library should have the possibility to compile natively on Windows either (from Visual C++ for example).

Thanks.

Answer 1

To some extent, this is going to depend on exactly what your library is meant to accomplish.

If you were developing a GUI application, for instance, you would want to focus on using a well-tested cross-platform framework such as wxWidgets.

If your library depends primarily on File IO, you would want to make sure you use an existing well-tested cross-platform filesystem abstraction library such as Boost Filesystem.

If your library is none of the above (i.e. there are no existing well-tested cross-platform frameworks for you to use), your best bet is to make sure you adhere to standard C++ as much as possible (this means don't #include <linux.h> or <windows.h>, for instance). When that isn't possible (i.e. your library reads raw sound data from a microphone), you'll want to make sure the implementation details for a given platform are sufficiently abstracted away so that you minimize the work involved in porting your library to another platform.