mixing c and c++

[Blessman11]

hi

Does anybody know how to mix c and c++ together or even how to force c++ compiler's like visual studio to accept "c" code (which I would have programmed) or generally mixing c++ code with other programming languages?

[Moschops]

C++ is very nearly a superset of C. In almost all cases, your C++ compiler will happily accept it.

If you've got already compiled code (such as libraries) that were compiled as C, that you want to link to with C++ code, it's a little more involved, but not much.

[Computergeek01]

Due to the drastically different styles I would strongly recommend against doing this if you are a beginner, bad habits are the hardest ones to break. There is very little C code that C++ doesn't like, and it's usually because there is a better way to do it in C++ so what specifically are you having trouble with?

I suppose, if you had to, you could compile two seperate source code files into their binaries and link them together. This would basically be what you want.

[moorecm]

Let's say you wanted to write a library in C++ and make it available to a C application. You can implement your library however you like, object oriented, using exceptions, etc.. However, you have to provide a strictly function-based interface for C calling code. You can do this by defining "wrapper" functions for the libraries functionality and converting the error policy (exception handling) back into a C-friendly equate policy. The last step is to use extern "C" to tell the C++ compiler not to use name mangling.

Now, if you want to use a C library in C++, you also use extern "C" to tell the C++ compiler not to expect name mangling form the C headers.

[tolga gerekci]

extern "C" is a good solution but if you have a C code, just change file extension from .cpp to .c. Your code will be compiled as C code :)