Re: [Chicken-users] dll import libs for MinGW

[Brandon J. Van Every]

Sergey Khorev wrote:
> BJV> I have been scratching my head wondering why my CMake build doesn't 
> BJV> generate any dll import libraries with MinGW.  I find that chicken.h has 
> BJV> lines about __declspec(dllexport) that look wrong.  It appears that this 
> BJV> is done only for MSVC compilers.  I don't think this is correct.  In 
> BJV> particular, MinGW is not at all like Cygwin.  The relevant section is:
>
> The MinGW build works so probably the problem is not in Chicken sources but in the way 
> they are built.
> I would recommend you to try build Chicken with MSYS and see which commands 
> does libtool use to build dll.
>   
Well, CMake doesn't take any automagical advantage of Cygwin or MinGW 
dll generation or linkage features.  This is by design.  If you want 
import libraries, you're supposed to have __declspec(dllexport) in your 
code like a good little Windows programmer.  I think what I'm saying is, 
Cygwin and MinGW are allowing programmers to be lazy in a way that is 
not standard drill for Windows programming in general.

Is there any reason to suppress __declspec(dllexport) in a Cygwin or 
MinGW Autoconf build?  If it doesn't hurt anything then they should just 
all do it the same way.

> BTW why do you need import libraries? ld in both MinGW and Cygwin can link to 
> dlls directly with the -l swith (e.g. -lchicken will try bind to libchicken.dll 
> along with some other filenames)
>   
I do not assume that just because Chicken is built with MinGW that it is 
going to be used with MinGW.  IIUC MinGW and MSVC code are often 
intermixed.  That is, if I grab a library from somewhere I shouldn't 
have to care whether MinGW or MSVC built it.



Cheers,
Brandon Van Every