As long as the implementation is completely hidden and the interface contains only legal types, then it shouldn't be a problem. [/quote]

There's nothing stopping you from using illegal types in your interface, you've just got to be careful about managing the types whose data size may change.


class Foo
{
public:

EXPORT Foo();
EXPORT virtual ~Foo();

EXPORT void func(const char* str);
inline void func(const std::string& str) { func(str.c_str()); }
};


This will partially work (in that you can create and use the class, but you can't use it as a base class, and it will generate a warning)


class Foo
{
public:

EXPORT Foo();
EXPORT virtual ~Foo();

EXPORT void func(const char* str);
inline void func(const std::string& str) { func(str.c_str()); }

EXPORT const char* getStr() const;

private:
std::string m_str;
};


[font=helvetica, arial, verdana, tahoma, sans-serif][size=2][color=#282828]So using STL in a class that will be exported by a DLL is a big no-no due to problems with differently compilers packing data in different formats. [/quote][/font]
[font=helvetica, arial, verdana, tahoma, sans-serif][size=2][color=#282828]It's got nothing to do with compiler packing, it's simply the inability to guarantee the size of the CSL containers (due to additional debugging nonsense). [/font]

[color=#282828][font=helvetica, arial, verdana, tahoma, sans-serif]

I think COM style interface is the best (at least it's best to me) to work cross DLLs.[/quote][/font]

I can't say I agree with you.... ;)

[color=#282828][font=helvetica, arial, verdana, tahoma, sans-serif]

I'm not sure if COM is still as popular as before .Net was born. [/quote]
It was never popular ;)[/font]

[color=#282828][font=helvetica, arial, verdana, tahoma, sans-serif]

For operator overloading, in COM, forget any C++ specified features, such as operator overloading, template, etc.[/font]

[/quote]

Why do you say that? There's nothing stopping you using template specialisations and operator overloading with COM or dlls.

This will partially work (in that you can create and use the class, but you can't use it as a base class, and it will generate a warning)

[font=helvetica, arial, verdana, tahoma, sans-serif][size=2][color=#282828]It's got nothing to do with compiler packing, it's simply the inability to guarantee the size of the CSL containers (due to additional debugging nonsense). [/font]
[/quote]

Again, size is only part of the problem. Standard library containers can have fundamentally different implementations with different compilers.

Is DirectX popular? It's using COM interface.