Re: libgcj, Win32 & dll's

[Alexandre Oliva <oliva at lsd dot ic dot unicamp dot br>]

On Jan 13, 2000, Tom Tromey <tromey@cygnus.com> wrote:

>>>>>> "Jeff" == Jeff Sturm <jsturm@sigma6.com> writes:

Jeff> BUT... all of libgcj is static-linked so far.  Libtool has no
Jeff> idea how to build a shared library on Win32, so I attempted to
Jeff> convert libgcj.a into libgcj.dll somehow, knowing nothing about
Jeff> DLLs in the process.

> I thought libtool could do this.  In fact I thought Ian wrote a bunch
> of changes to libtool specifically so that it could do this.

It's note very simple to convince libtool to create a DLL on
MS-Windows.  The first problem is that MS-Windows doesn't support
`incomplete' DLLs, so you must use libtool's -no-undefined, as a
promise that the library is not incomplete.  Then, there's all the
dllimport/dllexport mess, that must be explicitly taken care of in
user's code, which is the reason why libtool requires
AC_LIBTOOL_WIN32_DLL in configure.in to build DLLs.  That's the way to
tell libtool that the project has been ported to MesSy-Windows.

-- 
Alexandre Oliva http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva IC-Unicamp, Bra[sz]il
oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br,guarana.{org,com}} aoliva@{acm,computer}.org
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