What's the proper way to link against an executable on Windows?

Question

I need to use some symbols from the main executable in a plugin.

Linking against the executable causes the following linker errors:

i686-w64-mingw32-g++          


        

Answer 1

Like Keith Marshall stated in the comments, -Wl,--out-implib indeed works in combination with either:

• -Wl,--export-all-symbols

• by declaring symbols with __declspec(dllexport)

• or by providing a .def file

I went with the third option and wrote a bash script to generate a def file / version scripts on-the-fly to avoid exporting a lot of unneeded symbols.

The script can be found here.

Use it like:

export SYMBOLS_TO_EXPORT="*tools* *network* _Z8compressPvRjPKvjib ..." # use mangled names and skip leading underscores on i686
export HOSTPREFIX=i686-w64-mingw32 # unneeded on Windows
i686-w64-mingw32-g++ $(OBJS) `./gen_export_file $(OBJS)` -Wl,--out-implib=foo.exe.a -o foo.exe