[Haskell-cafe] Link error in ALUT "Hello, World"

[Sven Panne]

On Sunday 25 March 2007 04:38, Nobuhito Mori wrote:
> [...] Though there are clearly "link errors", I can not understand why it
> happens. By option "-package ALUT",  libalut.a (which made by pexports and
> dlltool because I do not know original "alut.lib" can be used by mingw) and
> other necessary libraries are automatically linked, I think. What is "@8"
> of "alutInit at 8"? [...]

Just a little bit of background: Because Microsoft has decided that *nothing* 
will be easy or straightforward on their platform, they introduced tons of 
different calling conventions:

   http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/984x0h58.aspx

When a function is called, arguments are pushed onto the stack. The question 
is: Who cleans up the stack then, the caller or the callee? For functions 
with variable argument lists like printf in C the usual answer is: The 
caller, because it is the only one who knows what was pushed (__cdecl 
convetion in MS speak). OTOH, having the cleanup code in the callee leads to 
slightly smaller code, assuming that a function is called more than once 
(__stdcall in MS speak). To catch a mismatch in calling conventions at link 
time (and because of a few other reasons), functions expection to be called 
the __stdcall way get a "@BytesOnTheStackToBeCleanedUp" suffix.

Historically, DLLs on Windows use the __stdcall convention, but there is no 
deep reason why. The OpenAL DLL uses __cdecl, but the reasons for this have 
probably vanished alongside Loki Software itself, the initial designers of 
OpenAL. ALUT is used with OpenAL, so it made sense to me to choose the same 
calling convention as the OpenAL DLL, i.e. __cdecl, for the ALUT DLL.

Looking at the OpenAL and ALUT Haskell packages, I think that there are some 
cut-and-paste bugs from the OpenGL/GLUT packages (where the DLLs use 
__stdcall). I'll have a look at it, but in the meantime could you please add 
a detailed description to the corresponding ticket of how you installed the 
OpenAL/ALUT packages and which OpenAL/ALUT DLLs/libs you used, how you tried 
to convert them etc. (command lines, outputs, ...)? I'd just like to make 
sure that I'll reproduce exactly what you did.

Cheers,
   S.