# Visual Basic > Slow Chat with the Microsoft Visual Basic team >  Internal conversions

## Maven

When visual basic goes to deal with code from other languages, there is quite a few conversions involved behind the scenes. A simple example would be string. When you pass a string, it gets converted into a c style string. Also if memory serves me right, there is some unicode-to-ascii conversions done as well. Which you end up having to use a byte array to stop that conversion from being done.

I'm curious if there is any complier options that could be used to control some of these conversions to help visual basic programmers plug into 3rd party code. Or perhaps future plans for the ability to define a interface for a exported function. IE: the ability to detail how a function should be called, such as calling conventions, and what conversions need to take place.

----------


## wossname

You can use a StringBuilder instead of a byte array.  The framework marshals StringBuilders to char*s.  You'll have to modify your API declaration though.

----------

