I really wish more projects would use .hpp to differentiate from C headers. It’s really annoying to have a single header extension blend across two incompatible languages.
I did this in a project and someone later came and changed them all to .h, because that was “the convention” and because “any C is valid C++”. Obviously neither of those things is true and I am constantly befuddled by people’s use of the word convention to mean “something some people do”. It didn’t seem worth the argument though.
…so that leads to another annoyance of mine. The insistence that there aren’t two languages but indeed one named C/C++. Obviously I’m being a bit sarcastic but people blur the lines HEAVILY and it drives me crazy. Most of the C code I’ve written is not compatible with C++…at least not without a lot of type casting at a bare minimum. Or a compiler flag to disable that. Never mind the other differences. And then there’s the restrict keyword, and the ABI problems if the C library you’re using doesn’t extern C in the headers…etc etc… -_-
Yeah, I use that all the time. I think I use it in a different way though. I have projects with C, C++ and other languages. The C and C++ get compiled and linked together, and so there are some considerations for those files that don’t apply to anything else. So I mean C files and C++ files, but not as if they were the same language.
Yeah that’s completely fair and makes sense to me. I just know I’ve come across stuff where people are talking about it like they’re the same language. This seems to be especially prevalent in windows development where the C support is pretty poor in comparison and tends to kinda be lumped into into C++.
Projects for Apple platforms usually also use .h, where it could mean anything from C/C++ to Objective-C/C++.
In practice, Clang handles mixed C/C++/Obj-C codebases pretty well and determining the language for a header never really felt like an issue since the API would usually already imply it (declaring a C++ class and/or Obj-C class would require the corresponding language to consume it).
If a C++ header is intended to be consumed from C, adding the usual
should alleviate the name mangling issues.
I don’t code in C++ (although I’m somewhat familiar with the syntax). My understanding is the header files should only contain prototypes / signatures, not actual implementations. But that doesn’t seem to be the case here. Have I misunderstood, or is that part of the joke?
I’m not fully sure what the intent of the joke is, but note that yes, it’s true that a header typically just has the prototype. However, tons of more advanced libraries are “header-only”. Everything is in a single header originally, in development, or it’s a collection of headers (that optionally gets “amalgamated” as a single header). This is sometimes done intentionally to simplify integration of the library (“just copy this files to your repo, or add it as a submodule”), but sometimes it’s entirely necessary because the code is just template code that needs to be in a header.
C++ 20 adds modules, and the situation is a bit more involved, but I’m not confident enough of elaborating on this. :) Compile times are much better, but it’s something that the build system and the compilers needs to support.
