Re: [3.2/3.3/HEAD] shared libobjc not built

["Timothy J. Wood" <tjw@omnigroup.com>]

On Thursday, January 2, 2003, at 04:00  PM, Nicola Pero wrote:

> Thanks - 'problems building shared objc in MinGW' - do you mean it 
> doesn't
> compile, or just that once you've compiled it, it's quite useless ?

   My personal experience was that the MinGW distribution just wouldn't 
build a DLL for ObjC.  I don't recall whether it was an error, or 
whether they inherited the configury from GCC that disabled shared 
libraries (for some other reason).  The responses I got on the MinGW 
list (around 1/6/2002) indicated that I should just use the GNUstep 
version.

   The only indication I see of *why* is that the GNUstep version had 
different configury bits and a .def file to export the right symbols.

   I'm assuming there was some real problem, but it's been so long ago 
that I may be misremembering and it might be that MinGW's problem is an 
effect of GCC's problem, not the other way around.

[...]
> building libobjc as static on MinGW is not really a solution either, 
> as it
> seems a libobjc.a on MinGW is not really a usable thing :-) [I think 
> the
> problem starts when people build all other libraries as DLLs, and 
> mixing
> DLLs and static libs doesn't seem a good thing ... well I don't really
> know, but that's what I heard].

   Building libobjc static under MinGW doesn't work well if your other 
libraries are DLLs _and_ if you want to get good warnings about 
undefined symbols in your DLLs.  You can link the static library into 
main application and then not link it into your DLLs (linking in both 
causes madness since you get multiple copies of the ObjC runtime data). 
  I don't recall why didn't go this direction unless it was that I 
somehow couldn't get DLLs to link with the undefined ObjC symbols...

> I suppose what we'd really want then is to fix building the libobjc
> shipped with GCC as a DLL on MinGW.  :-)
>
> I don't have the time to work on this.

   Yes, I'd definitely like this -- assuming ObjC as a shared library 
works in GCC now, I can maybe scrounge up some time to get it working 
on MinGW.

   I assume all I'd need to do would be to remove 'AC_DISABLE_SHARED' 
and then reconfigure?

-tim