I am new to C/C++. Wanted to know why we cannot declare ‘extern C’ for C++ macro’s similar to methods/functions…which will allow macro’s defined in C++ file to be accessed in .c files.
Thanks in Advance
Macros in both C and C++ are a text replacement mechanism. Because of that, you can’t define a macro in one source file and use it in a different source file.
What you can do is define a macro in a header file and include that header in both C and C++ source files where you want to use that macro.
Such a header would need to contain only code that comes from the common subset of C and C++ so it will be acceptable in both languages.
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Generally, you should not use macros in C++ at all. The main reason is that macros do not respect scope. They simply drop a chunk of code in the middle of your source file. This can cause all manner of bugs, which will be very hard to find, because you would have to do this textural insertion in your head.
In C++, if the cost of a function call is your performance bottleneck, then you should use inline functions, which do respect scope, instead of macros.
If you need to share code between C++ and C, then you probably should write a proper C function and declare that as extern "C". If you need to be able to call C++ code from C, then you should write a very thin C wrapper function around it.
IMHO, the simplest thing to do is to just use C++. The only reason to use C would be if you are working on an embedded platform, which doesn’t have a C++ compiler.
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