Microsoft has had a fair amount of trouble in the past when passing STL containers like string and vector pointers and references to DLLs. See, for example, You may experience an access violation when you access an STL object through a pointer or reference in a different DLL or EXE.

Question: Are those types of problems still present today in Visual Studio 2010 and 2013?

I know the question is a bit open-ended. I am asking because I’ve experienced them in the past, I’m working on a new design, the design could include a plugin architecture, and I would like to to pass a string or vector reference to a plugin DLL. If the problems still plague Microsoft, then I have to change the design (or come up with a workaround to avoid the crash).

Related, Did C++11 address concerns passing std lib objects between dynamic/shared library boundaries? is similar (thanks for the link). But it does not really answer the question, though it does seem to acknowledge the same problem.

Also, Microsoft’s KB Q168958, How to export an instantiation of a Standard Template Library (STL) class and a class that contains a data member that is an STL object, implies it can be done. But that’s around the time I recall having the problems, so I am curious if it still applies (and if it actually works now in Visual Studio 2010 or 2013).

The problem I am running into was highlighted by Robert and Doc: I can test for the presence of bugs, but not the absence of them. So I might not be able to trigger problems during testing, but the problems may really exists (and surface at the worse time).