typedef char CRITICAL_SECTION[24]; //24 is sizeof(CRITICAL_SECTION) !
Can you guarantee that this is the correct size on all systems? Are you sure that there are no alignment problems?
No I can't guarantee it across all systems. I made the edit to get [Boost][pool] to work for my project, without including windows.h. It would need to be checked and, if necessary appropriate conditional code provided.
typedef CRITICAL_SECTION *LPCRITICAL_SECTION;
#define WINAPI __stdcall
extern void WINAPI InitializeCriticalSection( __out LPCRITICAL_SECTION lpCriticalSection );
Does this actually link? I would think that it would need to be extern "C".
Yes, it does link, and appears to work, at least under Vista. I took the declaration directly from Windows API documentation. I could not find a declaration for CRITICAL_SECTION. I am sure there are better ways of doing this. I think the important thing is to avoid including windows.h, which defines a huge number of symbols and can break code. One particular nasty is the __in_range macro which conflicts with stlport's checked iterators in debug builds. A less risky change might be to simply undefine some of the undocumented macros that windows.h leaves behind it. A judicious use of namespaces allows you to avoid most of the other problems.