I am designing C library which does some mathematical calculations. I need to specify serialization interface to be able to save and then load some data. The question is, is it correct (from binary compatibility point of view) to use FILE* pointer in the public API of library?
Target platfoms are:
I need to be as much binary compatible as it possible, so at the moment my variant is the following:
void SMModuleSave(SMModule* module, FILE* dest);
SMModule* SMModuleLoad(FILE* src);
So I am curious if it is correct to use FILE* or better switch to wchar*/char* ?
I don't agree with ThiefMaster: there's no benefit in going native (ie using file descriptors of type int on linux and handles of type void * on windows) when there's an equivalent portable solution.
I'd probably go with FILE * instead of opening the files by name from within the library: It might be more of a hassle for library users, but it's also more flexible as most libc implementations provide various ways for file opening (fopen(), _wfopen(), _fdopen(), fdopen(), fmemopen(),...) and you don't have to maintain seperate wide-char APIs yourself.