library created with gcc acceptable in MS VC++ application ?

[Eljay Love-Jensen]

Hi Anup,

 >I am reading up about C ABI. What is the caveat ?

That you are speaking of the C ABI, not the C++ ABI(s), or FORTRAN ABI(s), 
or Pascal ABI(s).

 >I take it that the C ABIs established on most platforms pertain to 
dynamically linked libraries.

No, the C ABI established on most platforms pertain to the calling 
conventions between caller and callee (parameter order, stack clean up).

Plus some picayune details, such as "are char expanded to word size, or put 
on the stack as a char?"

As well as the symbol mangling conventions.  For instance, some platforms 
prepend an undercore ("_") on C symbols, so they won't collide with 
lovingly handcrafted assembly.

 > In that case I'd prefer to deliver .DLL, .so (runtime?)  etc. to my 
customers and use only gcc to generate them. BTW, is there a downside 
compared to packaging .lib, .o (static?) etc. ?

Okay, that should be viable.

 >Lately I've been looking into GCJ (from the wonderful GCC community :) to 
convert Java source to native libraries.

Okay.  I'm not familiar with that technology.

Sincerely,
--Eljay