Question

I often see __WIN32, WIN32 or __WIN32__. I assume that this depends on the used preprocessor (either one from visual studio, or gcc etc).

Do I now have to check first for os and then for the used compiler? We are using here G++ 4.4.x, Visual Studio 2008 and Xcode (which I assume is a gcc again) and ATM we are using just __WIN32__, __APPLE__ and __LINUX__.

Answer 1

It depends what you are trying to do. You can check the compiler if your program wants to make use of some specific functions (from the gcc toolchain for example). You can check for operating system ( _WINDOWS, __unix__ ) if you want to use some OS specific functions (regardless of compiler – for example CreateProcess on Windows and fork on unix).

Macros for Visual C

Macros for gcc

You must check the documentation of each compiler in order to be able to detect the differences when compiling. I remember that the gnu toolchain(gcc) has some functions in the C library (libc) that are not on other toolchains (like Visual C for example). This way if you want to use those functions out of commodity then you must detect that you are using GCC, so the code you must use would be the following:

#ifdef __GNUC__
// do my gcc specific stuff
#else
// ... handle this for other compilers
#endif