A brief post not related to Surface modeling but still hopefully useful...

Last week-end I was testing a first version of the X3D converter to be added to CAD Exchanger. X3D stands for eXtensible 3D format (ISO19975) which could be seen as a successor of VRML format. Check http://www.web3d.org for more details.

The persistent representation uses XML as a file format, and I use Open CASCADE XML formatter for that. Once the XML document has been created, it is fed into LDOM_XmlWriter (part of Open CASCADE) which dumps contents to the file. LDOM_XmlWriter accepts FILE* as a file object.

Now beings the problem. When OCC is compiled with vc7.1 (Visual Studio 2003) and the X3D converter – with vc8 (VS2005), the application crashes during output to an XML file (inside the fwrite() function). I was trying to use VS2003 for OCC binaries as some CAD Exchanger SDK users preferred that. The same problem shows up if OCC binaries are compiled with VS2005 and the X3D converter is compiled with VS2008.

The root cause of the crash is that a FILE pointer is checked against pre-defined constant pointers to file objects (including stdout, stderr, etc) inside the run-time library. And when this pointer has been created in one run-time (vc8) and is checked inside the other (vc7.1), a different code branch is executed eventually leading to null pointer access and hence crash.

Thus, interoperability between run-times is really very limited and you should do as much as you can to avoid mixing different run-times in one application. In particular, if you are using open source software (Open CASCADE and others), make sure you rebuild them with the same run-time. If you are distributing closed source, make sure you prebuild binaries for multiple run-times.

Hope this helps if you ever encounter with such an issue, or better yet - *before* you encounter ;-).