24.4. DLLs with Libtool

Windows' DLLs are very different from their nearest equivalent on Unix: shared libraries. This makes Libtool's job of hiding both behind the same abstraction extremely difficult—it is not fully implemented at the time of writing. As a package author who wants to use DLLs on Windows with Libtool, you must construct your packages very carefully to enable them to build and link with DLLs in the same way that they build and link with shared libraries on Unix.

Some of the difficulties that must be addressed are as follows:

  • At link time, a DLL effectively consists of two parts: the DLL itself, which contains the shared object code; and an import library, which consists of the stub[2] functions that are actually linked into the ...

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