When you start porting a large software project -- let's say 700k lines of code that had been running on Windows only for 12 years -- you want to introduce programming interfaces that elegantly hide platform-specific code. Often but now always, the C++ standard gives you such abstractions or you can use cross-platform libraries such as Qt and boost. They are good tools to build on, but there were quite a few cases where none of these were good enough. I will go over some of these cases to discuss the problems we encountered and how we approached them.
Recently, we have started to port some functionality to the web. We wanted to reuse our existing code-base of course, and that meant writing web applications in expressive, type- safe C++ and compiling to WebAssembly. But what do you do when you have to work with legacy JavaScript libraries from C++? I will present our novel tool that can generate type-safe C++ bindings from TypeScript interface definitions to solve that problem.
