Thread: Tell me everything about DLLs

I do most of my programming on the Mac so I've never made a dll before. My boss wants me to write a parser for a scripting language that we use internally and make it into a dll so that everyone else can use the same one.

I write in GNU C++ and C, it's important that it has to be GNU so that I can reuse the code to make a Mac resource too.

How do DLLs work (from a developer standpoint)? Is it up to the dll or the application using it to create a thread for it for it? Is there something special that I have to do so that I can have headers in different language? I'm the only one in the company using C++, most everyone else uses Javascript, Visual Basic, Python, or Java.

DLL's are very similar in concept to *nix shared objects
just a bunch of functions / objects accessible through outward facing symbols

MinGW is what you need
stands for Minimalist GNU for Windows
and it's the GCC + associated build utils ported to Windows

Get yourself a MinGW cross compiler for your platform, and you'll be able to compile native Windows code from Mac or Linux

there's plenty of documentation around covering cross-compiling

I have mingw on my PC at work, I'll load it up on my Mac since XCode is the best IDE anyway. I didn't know that I could cross compile from the Mac for Windows... does it still perform the multipass optimization?

AFAIK cross-compiling with MinGW produces identical results as native compiling

Beautiful, I can get rid of that go-awful PC at my workstation.

Dev-C++ and Visual Studios are nice, but it like a little toy compared to XCode.

installing mingw will give you a windows specific version of all the GCC compilers and utilities

Your native GCC would be

Code:

gcc -o c-prog c-prog.c
g++ -o cpp-prog cpp-prog.cpp

and for Win32 cross-compiling
I forget what the naming convention is exactly, but it's something like

Code:

mingw-gcc-win32 -o c-prog c-prog.c
mingw-g++-win32 -o cpp-prog cpp-prog.cpp

If you use windows specific things
(like using native windows threads, instead of using posix threads)
you will also need the mingw runtime
this is just a small DLL

If you code windows specific things into your code, any compiled code will depend (and be dynamically linked to) the runtime

but to be honest, everyone uses pthreads anyways....