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There appears to be various levels of support for several older/more obscure OSs/platforms, such as FreeBSD, and 16 bit MS Windows, MacOS < 10. It's also not clear which platforms and compilation methods we officially support. eg. See this comment about workarounds that are implemented and yet should be avoided.

While remaking this library, I'm not going to try to maintain the existing support. I simply do not have the ability nor the time to account for and test all these systems. This means that I'll be removing a lot of OS specific functions, variables, and macros.

Instead, we can take this approach as discussed:

• Aim to write platform independent code that conforms to the standard C++ distribution standards. eg. pay attention to:
  • Sizes of primitive data structures
• Support 64 bit Linux
• Add support for other major OS/Platforms one at a time. eg. Windows 32/64 bit, MacOS > 10, etc. Leverage CMake for multi-platform builds.

We should migrate these repo (+ issues etc) to the new WFDB organisation on GitHub:
https://github.com/wfdb

My first C++ conversion target is wfdbio.c with wfdb.h and wfdblib.h. Trying to compile this with C++ settings results in several errors from the memory allocation macros, such as: a value of type "void *" cannot be assigned to an entity of type "char *" when calling SALLOC.

List of said macros: https://github.com/bemoody/wfdb/blob/master/doc/wpg-src/wpg0.tex#L4693

We should try to replace them with standard C++ API calls where possible. This may also include replacing char* with std::string where required. I haven't looked into all of the macros, why they are/were needed, or potential solutions, so feel free to discuss all of that in this issue.

Strategy to break down this work:

1. Identify and document the replacement strategy for each macro
2. Remove macros and replace usage in lib directory
3. Replace usage in other directories

Checklist:

• SFREE:: Safely release allocated memory.
• SUALLOC:: Safely allocate memory using a new pointer.
• SALLOC:: Safely allocate memory, reusing a pointer.
• SREALLOC:: Safely expand a chunk of allocated memory.
• SSTRCPY:: Safely copy a string into a new buffer.