Re: [Mingw-cross-env-list] Static vs. shared libraries (was: gtkmm support)

[Martin Lambers]

On Sat, 19. Sep 2009, 19:46:16 +0200, Volker Grabsch wrote:
>     What is your general opinion about static/shared libs?
>     What is your concrete practical need?

On Windows, I prefer static libraries because they are so simple to use;
I just don't want to invest the time to sort out DLL issues. If there
was a way to use DLLs in a similarly simple way, that would be ok for
me, too. Package size is not important to me.

> With GTK it is a bit more complicated. It depends on many other
> libraries such as zlib (via libpng). For instance, if we build
> GTK as shared library and zlib as static library, the final
> application will not be able to use the zlib directly, because
> zlib would be included in the GTK DLL file as well as the EXE
> file, resulting in duplicate code, duplicate symbols and finally
> in fatal linker errors.

You can avoid this in special cases by putting
"-Wl,--allow-multiple-definition" into LDFLAGS (I currently do this when
using the precompiled MinGW Qt DLLs which include zlib). But this is
not a good idea if you cannot be sure that the two versions of the
symbols are compatible...

> Conclusion

I would prefer option (A), too.

Thanks for your nice summary!
Martin