On 10/25/2011 11:51 AM, Gary V. Vaughan wrote:
I have to bow to your superior knowledge of Windows, which I haven't used for development since Windows NT 4, but it feels weird that Libltdl really does twist itself into a pretzel for Windows... and yet all the other GNU projects I've looked at do no such thing (possibly because I haven't yet found another one that can be compiled with MSVC).
Well, a couple of points: #1, libltdl is not normal: unlike most libraries, we provide explicit support for (a) linking externally, (b) incorporating as a subproject and linking locally (separate ./configure), and (c) incorporating as a submodule(?) and linking locally (combined ./configure). Very few other libraries support any such thing OOB.
#2, I can think of one other GNU projects that support similar sub-inclusion: libintl. And /that/ library, and its cousin libiconv, also twist themselves into giant pretzels for Windows -- even moreso than libltdl. Bruno invented a whole new method of linking! http://www.haible.de/bruno/woe32dll.html
BTW: one possible solution to this whole conundrum is to adopt Bruno's method [*], which works for both MSVC and gcc. The idea is to *always* declare "exported" symbols as declspec(dllimport), even when linking against the static library. The trick is, some additional build steps when building the library itself, to add the requisite "import" thunks to the static lib. See the URL above for more info.
FWIW, Bruno has long said that this method would "work better" with "just a few additional lines of code in libtool". However, as he's never actually posted just WHAT those additional lines of code would BE, I've been at a loss to move forward. That's been the status now for several years (not really high on my priority list).
[*] without the -Wl,--disable-auto-import -- Chuck _______________________________________________ https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/libtool
