[Flac-dev] FLAC C API / Visual Studio 2008 FILE* Issue

[Stuart Fisher]

Now that you mention it I remember many years ago having a compatibility 
issue with some app we'd written. As I recall we had to get our customers to 
install msvcr70.dll because none of their machines had it (this was in the 
days of NT4). That dll came with the version of Visual Studio we were using 
but of course none of our customers had Visual Studio installed!

I guess Microsoft is off the hook then. Changing the name of the dll every 
release allows you make major changes, but it's not a very user friendly way 
of doing things. You end up with a whole lot of dlls containing the same 
functionality.  :-(

Getting back to the original problem, Steve's reasoning sounds like a 
possible explanation. Wide character and long filename support was something 
that was defnitely added later. I wouldn't be surprised if that meant yet 
another runtime dll!.



----- Original Message ----- 
From: "JonY" <jon_y at users.sourceforge.net>
To: <flac-dev at xiph.org>
Sent: Wednesday, January 06, 2010 12:09 PM
Subject: Re: [Flac-dev] FLAC C API / Visual Studio 2008 FILE* Issue


> On 1/6/2010 18:53, Stuart Fisher wrote:
>> I haven't done any FLAC development for some time now, but I've around 25 
>> years experience of working with libc and I don't really agree with Ben's 
>> view.
>>
>> You're talking about a binary compatibility issue and I'd be surprised if 
>> Microsoft had changed something in the library to break it. OS companies 
>> usually only break binary compatibility if they absolutely have to. 
>> Having said that, one of the things that is putting me off upgrading to 
>> Windows 7 is the fact they have felt the need to include some sort of 
>> "Windows XP emulator". Yes I'm still on Windows XP!!
>>
>>> From what you've said I think you're right that the error is somewhere 
>>> else.
>>
>> Stuart
>>
>
> Hi,
>
> Ben is likely talking about various versions of the MS runtime.
> MSVCRT.DLL != MSVCR90.DLL != MSVCR80.dll and so on.
>
> Only MSVCRT.DLL, that comes with nearly all win32 machines needs to
> maintain backwards ABI compatibility across different versions.
>
> MSVC2008 uses MSVCR90.DLL, so it doesn't need to maintain ABI
> compatibility with MSVCRT.DLL.
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