Átila on Code

I don’t think it’s a secret that the main component to C++’s success was that it was (nearly) backwards compatible with C. That made the switch easy, and one could always just extend existing software originally written in C by using  C++. It helped that, at the time, C++ had a feature set not really matched by any of the languages at the time. Abstractions at no cost? Fantastic.

It’s 2016 now, however. Many of the tasks that C++ was usually chosen for can now be done in Java, C#, Go, D, Swift, Rust, … the list goes on. Yet C++ endures. For me, it’s no longer my go-to language for pretty much anything. Unless… I have to call C code.

A few months ago at work, I decided to write my own implementation of certain C APIs in an embedded context in order to make it easy to test the codebase my team is responsible for. I had a quite extensive set of header files, and our C code was calling these APIs. I knew straight away that there was no chance of me picking C for this task, so the question was: which language then? I ended up going with  C++14. Why? #include, that’s why.

Every language under the sun has a way to call C code. It’d be silly not to, really. And it all looks straightforward enough: declare the function’s signature in your language’s syntax and tell it it’s got C linkage, and Bob’s your uncle. Except, of course, that all the examples are passing in ints, floats and const char*. And real life APIs don’t look like that at all.

They need pointers to structs, which are defined in a header that includes a header that includes a header that… Then there are usually macros. You don’t pass a regular int to a function call, you pass a macro call to a macro call (defined in a header that…). Then there’s the case in which macros are part of the API itself. It gets hairy pretty fast.

These days libclang has made it possible to write tools that parse headers and generate the bindings for you. There’s also SWIG. But this means complicated build system setups and they’re not foolproof. If you’ve ever used SWIG, you know there’s a lot of manual work to do.

But in C++…

#include "c_api_with_macros_and_stuff.h"

For me, that’s basically the only use case left for C++. To call C and not have to write C.