Re: [xml] More libxml questions

[Bjoern Hoehrmann <derhoermi gmx net>]

* richardcavell mail com wrote:
> 1.  Can I statically link libxml2 into my code on any platform?

The answer to that is likely "no" simply because "any platform" is too
vague. As I've encountered it, libxml is rarely statically linked for
various reasons, but I am not aware about anything that makes that im-
possible.

> 2.  Does libxml2 work well with MSVC, or does it need to be within a 
> mingw or similar environment?

It's been some time, but I've successfully compiled it with MSVC. It's
quite possible that ancient versions like Visual C++ 6.0 do not work,
but beyond that I would not expect many issues in principle.

> 3.  Is libxml2 C89 or C99?

C99 is for much of it an extended version of C89, as such I would find
it more likely to be C99, especially because compilers aren't all that
good telling you exactly when something is non-standard under some spe-
cificic version of some standard, but I do suspect that it is neither,
simply due to some obscure requirements in the standards.

> I guess what I'm asking is: I have a project that is open-source and 
> written in C99, using as little C99 and as much C89 as possible.  It 
> uses libcurl, and so only the portability of libcurl limits the 
> portability of my project.  If I start to use libxml, will that further 
> reduce the portability of the project?

I am quite sure, but the question is not very meaningful (some plat-
forms offer only a limited amount of memory and your application may
exceed that limit, for instance). As a rule of thumb, I would say an
application or library that compiles fine with GCC, MSVC, and a third
independent compiler, which I believe libxml2 does, that is as much
portability information as you can get, without being a lot more spe-
cific.
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