I am working with a library that is somewhat poorly written. In order to function, it requires several global variables to be declared and sometimes even maintained by my own code. I really don't like having to put a whole list of global variables at the start of my main file, and even less also having to extern them all in the .h file too.
Is there a good way (or at least, a less-bad way) to deal with this unfortunate situation?
Assuming that you cannot change the library, and you have to use it, you need to have these global variables somewhere in your code.
I’d recommend implementing an interface module that the rest of your application calls instead of calling the library directly; that module could be plain C, it could be some class, whatever you would have wanted if you had been free to design and implement the library yourself.
That interface module declares and maintains the global variables needed, and hides that ugliness from the rest of your code. Even header files of that library would only be imported by your interface module, and nobody else.
