Porting msvc code to Android/ios

Issue

I have a pretty large project written in C++ for Windows, with some MSVC-specific fancy things, like __declspec(property), usage of SEH, extra template and macro flexibility, intrinsics and etc.

In a nutshell it consists of various applications and a shared library (lib), which is a pretty large "algorithmic" code. It's written entirely in plain C++ (MSVC's version of it, as I said), not dependent on any 3rd-party, all the code is "hand-made", no stdlib, STL, Boost or etc.

Now this code needs to be ported to mobile platforms, namely Android and iOS.

The code should be platform-independent. No explicit dependence on OS, besides the very basic things, like heap memory allocation. It does depend on some Windows-specific things: SEH, TLS, but those are the things I can sacrifice, if they can't be replaced.

And I'm thinking about how to deal with it. Cleaning the whole code from MSVC-specific stuff is possible, but not convenient. I'd prefer to keep them, and definitely I don't want to keep several codebases for different platforms.

So, what are the options at my disposal? As I understood, there are C++ compilers for Android (part of NDK), but they are probably standard C++ compliant. Anyway, iOS development is based on Objective-C, which is a superset of plain C.

This led me to an idea to "compile" the existing MSVC-specific C++ code into a plain C. There is an option in MSVC compiler to generate "listing" files, containing the assembler code. I guess if there's an option to create appropriate listings containing C-code. Or alternatively MSVC-compliant 3rd party C++ -> C converters.

Any thoughts?

Solution

MSVC++ to C compilers come in the "if you have to ask, you can't afford it" category. Just too small a market.

A more realistic chance would be to wait what Microsoft is doing. They're seriously looking into targeting additional mobile platforms with MSVC 2015.

TLS is probably the easiest, as that is standard C++ (thread_local). SEH should be mapped to regular C++ exception handling, which means you need to trap pointer bugs before they happen. MSVC isn't exactly known for extra template flexibility, it's in fact rather inflexible. x86 intrinsics obviously are right out on ARM.

Answered By - MSalters