Crosscompiler Binary compatibility in C

Question

I need to verify something for which I have doubts. If a shared library ( .dll) is written in C, with the C99 standard and compiled under a compiler. Say MinGw. Then in my exper

Answer 1

The general rule is that IF your OS/CPU combination has a standard ABI, and IF that ABI is powerful enough for your language, most compilers will follow that ABI and as a result will be binary compatible, allowing you to link libraries (shared or static) compiled with different compilers to programs compiled with other compilers just fine.

The problem is that most ABIs are fairly weak -- they're designed around low-level languages like C and FORTRAN and date back to the days before object oriented languages like C++. So they tend to lack support for things like function overloading, user-defined operators, exceptions, global contructors and destructors, virtual functions, inheritance, and such that are needed by C++.

This lack was recognized when C++ was designed which is why C++ has extern "C" -- which causes the compiler to limit itself to the standard ABI for certain functions, while disabling all the extra C++ features that the ABIs generally don't support.