Re: [Gnucap-devel] mingw DLL problem

[David Fang]

> > Can you show me how libtool solves the problem at hand?  I don't
> > see it.
>
> It doesn't. It inherits the limitation of the underlying dynamic linker.
> It just makes it easier to write portable code if you can live with the
> lowest common denominator of all dynamic linker capabilities.

Hi,
	If the question was about what flags to pass during compilation 
(e.g. -fPIC, -fno-common, ...), libtool would take care of that for you. 
(I still see a non-fatal warning about -rdynamic on Darwin, indicating 
that something's wrong, for instance.)  The libtool manual also documents 
a AC_LIBTOOL_WIN32_DLL autoconf macro for handling DLLs built from sources 
with __declspec(dllexport).  You'll still need to accommodate those 
directives in the source, of course.
	FWIW, the simplified interface provided by libtool has saved me 
the trouble of figuring out shared-library compiler/linker flags across 
Solaris, Linux, Freebsd, and Darwin (including old versions), which has 
given me time to work on real development.  I have not yet run into any 
lowest-common-denominator limitations yet, as a data point, but I haven't 
had access to the more obscure platforms for testing.
	And yes, I understand that the build-system is still a work in 
progress -- please take care of the more important matters first.  :)

Fang

David Fang
Computer Systems Laboratory
Electrical & Computer Engineering
Cornell University
http://www.csl.cornell.edu/~fang/
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