Is it it possible to fix Windows headers (winnt.h, windefs.h) so they can be compiled with /Za?

Question

I'm developing an application for multiple platforms (Windows, Linux, Mac OS X) and I want to make sure my code complies to ISO C++ standard. On Linux and Mac it's achieved with -pedantic-errors flag, on Windows - with /Za flag (disable language extensions). The problem is, some Windows headers are not C++-compliant (and in a silly way, nothing major - most errors are '$' : unexpected in macro definition , '__forceinline' not permitted on data declarations and similar nonsense). Do you think it would be possible to fix the headers? Has anyone tried that?

Answer 1

No, this is impossible. For a lovely discussion on the matter started by STL (the guy, not the acronym) on the Clang developers mailing list see here .

That being said, if you want to write standard conforming code, I suggest using MinGW-w64 GCC on Windows, which provides its own Win32 API headers that can be compiled with -std=c++11 -pedantic -Wall -Wextra . I can even offer you Clang 3.2 . It's 32-bit only and relies on GCC 4.6's libstdc++, but they get along quite well. I have a Clang 3.3 build on my computer at home but libstdc++ and Clang disagree on some variadic template linking issues, so I haven't uploaded it.

Answer 2

Since you want to write a portable code - do it. Your windows headers have nothing to do with it. After you port your code to Linux for example you'll not have them so do not bother.

It is your code (that one that you write) that must be portable so do not worry about __forceinline within some header that will not even be on any different platform that you may use.

So - do not bother about warnings that are not from your code.

Update: If these generate warnings you may supress them. If errors you may try the following:

• as for _forceinlilne this is (at least in different compilers) just a suggestion for the compiler to try as hard to inline sth - but cannot force it - you may delete it safely if you really need to
• as for other errors - please give an example

Answer 3

One possible solution is to use a mingw/cygwin gcc with the winapi headers that ship with them. They are not complete, so you might need to copy some declarations from the Windows SDK if you are using newer stuff. But, as others mentioned, your code is already not portable if you are using the windows headers.