From time to time you may need to borrow library written in C and compile them with your C++ program. You may notice that simply including the C headers and compiling them will result in error, citing improper references to the function. The reason is due to C++ name mangling mechanism which tries to generate unique name for each function definition. This is especially useful in C++ where there can be multiple functions with same name but different parameters. On the other hand, C does not permit function with same name.

So in order to include C library in C++, use:

extern "C" {
#include "header.h" // C library code here...
}

By using extern you are telling the compiler not perform name mangling on the specified functions in the library. Then you can just call the function as usual.