MinGW libraries

Hi,

I am using Eclipse C++ on Windows with MinGW for linkage. Can you tell
me why the libraries used by MinGW (in the \MinGW\lib directory) have
a .a extension, wich is unix library extension? I thought that MinGW
would use .lib libraries.

Thank you.

re: MinGW libraries

John wrote:No, but you could probably find out in either gnu.g++.help or an Eclipse
newsgroup or mailing list.

What was your C++ language question?

re: MinGW libraries

On 2007-10-06 18:08, John wrote:Because MinGW is trying hard to be UNIX running on tom of windows. For
further questions about MinGW please use a MinGW group/mailing list.

--
Erik Wikström

re: MinGW libraries

John wrote in message...Could it be because a static library is a collection of object files,
sometimes called an "Archive"? The ".lib" extension is, AFAIK, a ms thing. I
have changed the '.lib' extension to '.a' on a few third-party libraries,
and it worked fine with GCC(MinGW).

--
Bob R
POVrookie

re: MinGW libraries

John wrote in message...Could it be because a static library is a collection of object files,
sometimes called an "Archive"? The ".lib" extension is, AFAIK, a ms thing. I
have changed the '.lib' extension to '.a' on a few third-party libraries,
and it worked fine with GCC(MinGW).

--
Bob R
POVrookie

re: MinGW libraries

On Oct 9, 3:00 am, "BobR" <removeBadB...@worldnet.att.netwrote:It's more than that.
And an archive can have other types of files in it.
I think it's pretty universal. I've seen it on a lot of
systems. Unix doesn't use it, simply because Unix doesn't have
real library files; in the older versions of Unix, a "library"
was an archive with a special first entry, created by ranlib.
(I'm not sure that the traditional differences are very
important today, but back when machines where a lot slower,
having a random index could make linking a lot faster.)
I'm pretty sure that g++ under Windows can understand .lib
files, as well as Unix-like .a files. (For that matter, the
files generated by CygWin's ar look very much like the files
generated by Microsoft's lib.)

--
James Kanze (GABI Software) email:james.kanze@gmail.com
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re: MinGW libraries

Alf P. Steinbach wrote:The object files are COFF. I don't think COFF or ELF say
anything about the format of a library file. But Microsoft
seems to have adopted something very much like the Unix format.
Not necessarily. The C-API is well defined, and you might want
to link against third party libraries using it.

--
James Kanze (GABI Software) mailto:james.kanze@gmail.com
Conseils en informatique orientée objet/
Beratung in objektorientierter Datenverarbeitung
9 place Sémard, 78210 St.-Cyr-l'École, France, +33 (0)1 30 23 00 34