force visual studio to link all symbols in a lib file

Question

Is there any way to force visual studio to link all symbols from a lib file into the dll as atm it is optimizing \"unused\" functions which are needed by the program using t

Answer 1

How is the DLL going to call the functions from your lib at runtime? That sounds a bit hard to believe.

Now if users of the DLL are going to call your library functions, your question makes sense. Windows compilers (unlike Unix compilers) only export functions from a DLL if explicitly requested. The most common way to do this is to declare the function "dllexport", but you can also name the functions in a .DEF file as pass it to the linker. Note that you need to list the C++ mangled name in the .DEF file.