Re: [Boost-users] Support for VS 2005 C++/CLI offtopic: why C++/C LI?

From: John Dunn (John_Dunn_at_[hidden])
Date: 2006-10-20 11:45:09

> From: Andre Krause
> 
> just a beginners question, not want to start any flames:
> why are you using C++/CLI mode, if you are using portable 
> libraries like boost anyway? why not build a native C++ 
> application? what are pro's and con's? i must admit that i 
> never got my head up into .net stuff, because i thought: "no 
> way, i completely will loose cross platform." but now with 
> mono, thats not true that much anymore. i heard that bytecode 
> might be even faster than native code, because these bytecode 
> JIT compilers can "magically" optimise speed at runtime!! ( 
> see http://psyco.sourceforge.net/, 
> http://www.kano.net/javabench/ , 
> http://www.idiom.com/~zilla/Computer/javaCbenchmark.html )
> 

Valid question. I'm using C++/CLI because I want to use the new Windows
Presentation Foundation ( WPF ) libries which only have a managed API. So my
choices are C++/CLI, C#, VB or XAML. Using these libraries are the only way
to get 'next-gen' hardware accelerated GUI applications as far as I know.
Compared to the Win32 API, WPF is a huge win - it's saved me months since I
didn't have to write my own windowing framework.

If our application was Windows only I'd probably not be using boost but we
also have a bunch of shared portable code that needs to run on Windows, x86
Linux and PPC Linux, so I need to figure out how to integrate boost properly
into a C++/CLI application.