R: Plugin development under windows

[Joseph Myers]

On Mon, 27 Mar 2017, Davide Piombo wrote:

> Sorry but it is not clear to me if the point is that the plugin 
> development must include some windows-related code that I'm actually 
> missing or if the problem is on the GCC side, that is inside GCC the 
> code section that loads the dll, or part of it, is missing and it is 
> still to be implemented.

GCC only knows about how to dynamically load ELF shared libraries on a 
Unix-like operating system.  It does not know anything about whatever 
interfaces Windows provides to load DLLs.

GCC assumes a shared library can access symbols dynamically exported by 
its internal cc1 and cc1plus executables.  I've heard that DLLs work 
differently (without an equivalent of -rdynamic), such that for a DLL to 
access GCC-internal functions the whole of cc1/cc1plus would instead need 
to be moved into a DLL.

This requires someone with expertise on the relevant Windows facilities 
(and probably significant cross-platform expertise as well, since you need 
to adapt the build system and plugin support to do the required things for 
each platform) to implement the support in GCC for plugins on Windows 
host.

-- 
Joseph S. Myers
joseph@codesourcery.com