Alternatives to including MS C runtime distro?

Question

I use MSVS 2010 and MSVC++E 2010 to build my applications in C++ and I've notice a lot of my friends (who test my apps on their PCs) don't have the Microsoft C++ runtime library installed on their computers. I've started including the Microsoft C++ redistributable package with my apps, but this seems unnecessary. Would I be able to instead include the libraries in my executable directory? I know that one of the libraries used is msvcr100.dll, but are there also others I need to include? Or is the redistro my best option?

Answer 1

in your project options, for code generation, you can choose the STATICally linked libraries instead of the DLL versions. That eliminates the need for an external dependency like this, at the cost of a larger EXE.

Answer 2

When you build your application to a static runtime, you don't need to distribute the runtime dlls.

Otherwise you have to include the Microsoft runtime.

Links to runtime installers for Visual Studio 2010

Answer 3

You don't necessarily need to HAVE to have the runtime library within your executable directory, you may use a Manifest File that has a relative path which points to runtime if you wish. But yes, you can include the libraries within the install of your application.

I think we lug around the msvcr as well as the msvcrt and the msvcp DLLs which now that I'm writing that out, might be a bit overkill.

Answer 4

Compiling your project with /MT solves the distribution problem. Be careful though, it can get you in trouble when you use DLLs. They will have their own memory allocator. If they export a function that exposes a pointer or a C++ object that needs to be released by the client code then you'll have a very hard to diagnose memory leak on your hands. Very easy to do, just return an std::string for example.

Anyhoo, the setting is found by right-clicking the project in the Solution Explorer window, Properties, C/C++, Code generation, Runtime Library setting.

Also note that VS2010 supports local deployment. Just put the msvcr100.dll file in the same directory as your EXE. You also need msvcp100.dll if you use STL or iostreams.