Type Safety of Boost.Extension

Type-safe classes in Boost.Extension:

Other classes:

reflection, instance: An instance must be used only with the reflection from which it was created. Other than this, these two classes are type safe.
shared_library: The get functions for this class do not guarantee type safety. This is caused by the fact that the underlying operating system-specific functions return void pointers that must be converted to function pointers.

To help alleviate type safety issues when using shared_library, it is recommended that a common function signature be used in each shared library. The library provides shortcuts for this technique, which are used in boost_extension.tutorials.tutorial02.

To help overcome the type safety problems with the instance class, it would be possible to have each instance contain a reference to the reflection that created it, and then only allow that functions from that reflection to be called. The plan is to add this as an option, which can be disabled with a preprocessor macro, but it may be added permanently, depending on input from the Boost community.