moving code from unix to windows xp

Question

Hi, i have code written in c++. its a console app that takes an input and displays output. Now i can just give my a.out to someone without giving them the code and it should work on another unix system. but what if they have windows environment. I would like to learn how to make dll for them so they can run that.

also, if they were going to use it as part of another program I guess i would need to make an api or function for them. But i am not sure how that works with dlls as i have never done this before.

Answer 1

This will get you started: Cross Compiler article on Wikipedia.

Answer 2

Now i can just give my a.out to someone without giving them the code and it should work on another unix system.

No it shouldn't and almost certainly won't. Executables are not typically portable across even closely related operating systems, and most flavours of Unix are not too closely related. You need to compile your application for the specific (and "unix" is not specific enough) target OSs you are interested in.

Answer 3

You need to recompile your application for Windows, either on a Windows machine or by using a crosscompiler. This requires that all routines which you use need to be available under Windows, too.

Either you wrote your application from scratch using portable libraries (read: no unix/posix system calls), or you will get problems porting your code to run under Windows. Cygwin can probably help, check it out.

If you say its a pure console app, I assume you're using std::cout and std::cin or other stuff from the C++ standard library. These are indeed universally available on every C++ implementation.