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I'd guess that majority of such binary-only libraries use C ABI interfaces. The entire Windows ecosystem of COM modules works on top of C ABI's.

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rfoo 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Until the moment when you are forced to use a third-party SDK with std:: and boost:: (yeah, WTF?) types in the interface.

Oh, and you can't avoid that, say, you are working on a trading bot and that's the only "supported" way to connect to an exchange.

In the end people usually just reverse engineer and reimplement to get rid of such cursed blob. Fortunately, it works - the vendor can't effectively push all clients to update their SDK too, so all wire protocols are infinitely backward compatible.

	▲	gary_0 an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		The last time I was forced to deal with such a proprietary SDK (that required an ancient Windows C++ runtime, and segfaulted like crazy, natch), rather than waste months reverse-engineering it, I wrapped it in a separate process and talked to it via IPC. That got the job done, and every time their shitty code locked up or crashed, I just restarted the wrapper process from the main application.
	▲	HelloNurse 38 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		For mummified binary dependencies, C# allows tediously fine control over stack frames in DLL function calls, and similar FFI systems are likely to be equally malleable; there's probably a blind spot towards reverse engineering in C++, due to the expectation that a random ABI should "just work".