ansaurus

Question

Using MinGW built dll in a Visual Studio 2010 C++ project

Answer 1

+2 A:

Have you heard about name mangling? Unless the functions exported from DLL are marked as extern "C" their names are going to be mangled in a compiler-specific way. Thus the problem.

Armen Tsirunyan 2010-10-13 14:04:46

And to make it worse, it is not only about the name mangling, also other stuff like exception handling or object memory layout is incompatible. And this is not limited to different compilers , also different versions of one compiler, or compiler invocations with different options can be incompatible to each other.

Rudi 2010-10-13 14:12:22

@Rudi: +1. Not to mention different implementations of the Standard Library.

Nemanja Trifunovic 2010-10-13 14:29:37

Answer 2

A:

If you want your dll to be used with another compiler you have the following options:

Expose only "C" interface (with extern "C") - no classes or anyting C++ specific.
Make a COM dll.
Make your on COM-like model that follows the same constraints.

Nemanja Trifunovic 2010-10-13 14:09:37

I think pure abstract classes are also compiler-independent (to some extent at least).

Pedro d'Aquino 2010-10-13 14:21:32

@Pedro: That's what I meant by the option 3) although it is a little more complicated than just using abstract classes.

Nemanja Trifunovic 2010-10-13 14:28:11

GCC and MSVC can both be used to make COM dlls - which is a binary interface based on having compliant implementations of virtual functions. IT should be possible to pass pure virtual classes between MSVC and GCC safely (Again, assuming the parameter types are POD or pure virtual classes)

Chris Becke 2010-10-13 14:53:48

How can I create a COM dll (Binary interface / ABI) dll using gcc? I think I use the wrong keyword because i find nothing to this topic.

Sascha 2010-10-14 06:52:12

@Sascha: Start from here to see how it works (although the samples use pure C it is easy to convert it to C++) http://www.codeproject.com/KB/COM/com_in_c1.aspx

Nemanja Trifunovic 2010-10-14 13:11:09

Answer 3

A:

Thanks for the answers. I cannot think much more so I will try "extern "C"" tomorrow.

Sascha 2010-10-13 14:46:01

ansaurus

tags:

views:

answers:

Using MinGW built dll in a Visual Studio 2010 C++ project

related questions