Re: [gtkmm] gtkmm-2.4 on MSVC

[Frank Naumann <fnaumann cs uni-magdeburg de>]

Hello!

> A few weeks ago I set out to reach a similar goal, but to my shame the 
> attempt petered. The reason was that fixing the linking problems required a 
> dllimport/dllexport to be added in front of all class declarations (in the 
> .hg and .ccg files to keep those changes), plus some other places, namely 
> statically declared functions in .ccg files and all global objects, which 
> should keep their 'extern' specifier in their declaration. Well, I tried to 
> disentangle the m4 macro files but didn't have enough time to pursue.

Maybe as explanation for Murray: To build a shared library under MSVC
(dll) you need to specify the exported classes, variables and functions. 
This is done with a special keyword (__declspec). You need to difference 
between import and export, e.g. if you compile the dll you must write 
__declspec(dllexport), if you use the dll you need to write 
__declspec(dllimport).

Practical you do something like that:

In a global header you define:

#ifdef WIN32
# ifdef GTKMM_DLL
#  define WINDLL_GTKMM __declspec(dllexport)
# else
#  define WINDLL_GTKMM __declspec(dllimport)
# endif
#endif

And then you write a class definition:

class WINDLL_GTKMM dll_exported_class
{
   ...
};

An exported function:

/* prototype */
int WINDLL_GTKMM dll_exported_function(void);

An exported variable:

/* header */
extern WINDLL_GTKMM int dll_exported_variable;


Then you only need to set GTKMM_DLL as default define if you compile the 
gtkmm.dll. If you use the dll don't define anything. For a static library 
just define WINDLL_GTKMM to nothing.


Regards,
Frank