Re: [boost] Re: Re: Better Intel-Win32 support

From: Beman Dawes (bdawes_at_[hidden])
Date: 2003-06-04 14:54:21

At 11:24 AM 6/4/2003, Edward Diener wrote:

 >I don't know about Intel-Win32 but I brought much of this up regarding 
MSVC
 >7.0+ and most everybody yawned. I am glad that some people have woken up 
to
 >the fact that there is a problem using wide characters with compilers 
which
 >support both the native C++ wide character and a previous typedef for
 >wchar_t. A disappointing aspect of this in regards to MSVC 7.0+ is that
 >there is no preprocessor macro ( as of 7.0, I haven't checked 7.1 yet )
 >which MSVC defines for distinguishing native C++ wide character from the
 >previous typedef for wchar_t. And as you have said, serious linker errors
 >will occur for Boost libraries with wide character usage if they are 
built
 >for one or the other version of wide character and the end-user sets the
 >opposite version of wide character in their Makes or projects.
 >
 >Although this is not a C++ problem or a Boost code problem directly, but
 >rather an implementation problem affecting a wide base of programmers, I
 >think Boost needs a clear strategy for dealing with it for any Boost
 >library built with wide character support and that all such 
libraries >conform to
 >that strategy. Of course it's a PITA, and of course MS brought it on
 >themselves by supporting a non-C++ version of wchar_t for many years ( 
and
 >I am guessing that Intel, in order to be a plug-in for VC++ followed
 >suit ), but it still needs to be dealt with in some logical manner.

Hum... I just had a thought. Is it possible to detect if wchar_t is a 
typedef at compile time?

Yes, I think so. Won't boost::is_same< unsigned short, wchar_t >::value be 
true if wchar_t is a typedef, and false if a distinct type?

I'll do some experiments.

--Beman