Farid Zaripov wrote:
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Martin Sebor [mailto:sebor@roguewave.com] 
>> Sent: Tuesday, March 06, 2007 7:55 PM
>> To: stdcxx-dev@incubator.apache.org
>> Subject: Re: [PATCH] RE: Cygwin cannot find -lstd12d
>>
>>>   But in this case using both variables have the same 
>> effect because 
>>> the linker used only when shared library built.
>> Okay, so --out-implib is only needed/allowed when creating 
>> the library. http://www.mingw.org/docs.shtml has an example 
>> of how to create a shared library on MinGW. It uses the .dll 
>> suffix rather than .so for the name of the library. We have 
>> .so. Should the name of our library be changed to .dll or 
>> does it matter?
> 
>   It doesn't' matter. Dll is just an extension of the file.

I thought Windows understands the .dll suffix as meaning
something special. Just like it does .exe and, AFAIK, will
refuse to execute files with no extension (as silly as that
is).

> 
>> (I'm sure it would matter if the user wanted 
>> to link the shared library in a program using MSVC.)
> 
>   In my opinion it is bad thing to link a program with library built on
> Cygwin
> using MSVC. The config.h files are different.

You're right, it could be risky and hard to get right. But
it is possible to do nonetheless (for example, by exposing
a C API to a library implemented in C++).

Looking through the lib/ directories in a Cygwin installation
I see .a files and .dll.a files, and also a few .la files, but
no .so's. We should probably follow their example and give our
shared library a suffix that corresponds to the shared library
suffix Cygwin uses. I'm guessing it's .dll.a?

> And also the library,
> build on
> cygwin, depends on cygwin1.dll and that library (size 1.8Mb) should be
> distributed with the program.

True.

Martin