It's possible in some languages, but it often involves serious messing around. For example, in C, this would involve function name aliasing which is usually a

It's possible in some languages, but it often involves serious messing around. For example, in C, this would involve function name aliasing which is usually a compiler specific extension. This might give you name compatibility, but to get struct-level compatibility, you'd have to copy the exact layouts due to padding issues. In C++ it's even harder, due to when vtables are emitted, etc. My java knowledge is old (java 5), so i don't know if they made it possible. Objective-C, I believe it would only be possible if you used the runtime reflection methods directly. I don't think you can easily do it with just headers (corrections welcome!) etc