Re: [ft-devel] FreeType DLL support (Re: Freetype-devel Digest, Vol 156, Issue 12)

[Martin Gieseking]

Am 12.01.2018 um 23:34 schrieb Hin-Tak Leung:
> 
> --------------------------------------------
> On Sat, 13/1/18, Martin Gieseking <address@hidden> wrote:
>  
>  > Not really.
>  > dllexport/dllimport is platform- and not
>  > compiler-specific.
>  > GCC and Clang on MinGW
>  > also support them to declare the symbols that are
>  > supposed to be exported by the DLL and adapt
>  > the symbol names
>  > accordingly. In order to
>  > create/access DLLs through this mechanism
>  > across compilers, the declarations should be
>  > added independently from
>  > the compiler.
> 
> You don't know what you are talking about. Do you actually use mingw to build 
> Freetype at all? I do. I have been building Freetype dll very regularly with 
> the mingw toolchain for a couple of years. The Fontval windows backend is a 
> Freetype dll. Does not need those header hacks. Those hacks are only needed 
> for use with Microsoft compilers.

Thank you for the kind words. I actually work with the FreeType library
for a long time as well and build/use the corresponding DLLs created
with MinGW and MSVC. I was referring to scenarios where different
compilers are involved and not just a single one. For example, if I want
to call functions provided by a DLL that was built with MSVC from an
application compiled in the MinGW environment, I usually have to use
dllimport in order to get the names, i.e. the _imp_ prefixes, right.